At the top of his autobiographical show Character Man, now running off-Broadway, Jim Brochu defines the title figure as an actor who exhibits “unusual characteristics or peculiarities.” That could mean a reedy voice, a triple chin, or some ineffable strangeness of bearing that brands him as “other.” We tend to conflate character and supporting roles, but character acting can’t be measured in screen time or plot function. Mostly it serves to add sugar and spice, not stock, to the soup; character actors can be desultory and weird, unshackled as they are from the hero’s innate linearity. This should not be confused with personality acting, the inclination to “play oneself,” nor do tics and shtick a character actor make: Christopher Walken is a personality character actor; Adam Sandler is a personality leading man.

For a profitable survey of character acting, in all the term’s elasticity, one is referred to New Directors / New Films. A number of movies in the series regard eccentricity of mien through social and dramaturgic lenses, examining both how character actors create assumptions by their very presence and how these assumptions demarcate character from conventional performance.

Such slippage is exemplified in Richard Ayoade’s jet-black comedy The Double. Channeling Dostoevsky’s novel through a prism of Gilliam-esque absurdity, Ayoade’s film follows office milquetoast Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) through his daily rounds of shame and rejection, eventually pitting him against a doppelgänger (also played by Eisenberg) who brims with the very confidence Simon lacks. But before we meet the brash facsimile, we’re embedded in Simon’s drab, dismal world, overpopulated with disapproving forces. The first on the scene is his boss, Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn), a balding, pugnacious little man who strides through the catacombs of the workplace barking directives (“Put on your coat, son! This isn’t a brothel!”).

The Double

Within seconds the Papadopoulos character is firmly established—a fact which owes less to scripting or performance than to precision of casting. Shawn’s nasal bray and choleric demeanor imply perversely cheerful tyranny, but more to the point, our past associations with Shawn paint a piquant picture before he utters his first word. We may come to know him as a mid-level Napoleon from his stature and temperament, but no inferences are necessary because Shawn, a premier personality-character actor, has cornered the mid-level Napoleon market. Thus when he enters the frame we’re seeing a Papadopoulos borne of The Princess Bride’s Vizzini (“Absolutely, totally, and in all other ways inconceivable!”), Mr. Hall in Clueless (“Could the suicide attempts please be postponed until next period?”), and even “Wally,” Shawn’s interpretation of himself as a highly strung neurotic in My Dinner With Andre.

This tactic of image appropriation extends to Cathy Moriarty as a brazen, bottle-blonde waitress; James Fox as the enigmatic director known as The General; and two veterans of Ayoade’s Submarine, Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine, as (respectively) a brittle receptionist and an outlandish TV personality. None of these actors appear onscreen for more than a minute or two (only Eisenberg and love interest Mia Wasikowska have substantial roles), so all are summoned to invoke shorthand versions of personages they've acquainted us with before. This not only helps lighten the screenplay's expositional load, but it situates the film in a larger cultural constellation.

Indeed, stereotype forms the basis of Eisenberg’s turn as well. Despite his leading man status, Eisenberg’s gangly stance and diffident manner make him a born character actor. Simon James is merely an exaggeration of the standard Eisenberg type: clipped delivery, discomposure, propensity to end each encounter with an apology (even inanimate objects seem to inspire contrition). Conjuring the mirror image, Eisenberg tweaks his trademark affectations in service of an antithetical creation; his sparrowlike twitches take on hawkish dimensions. And in “playing double,” he joins a tradition of actors juxtaposing familiar and oppositional takes on their personae (see Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, Nicolas Cage in Adaptation, Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy)—roles which harken an entry, or at least a digression, into character work.

Obvious Child

Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child proffers a sterling example of the character lead: Jenny Slate’s Donna, a twentysomething would-be comic and aspiring adult. Like Eisenberg, SNL alum Slate is too quirky to conform to a traditional mold. With her penchant for unfiltered pronouncements and gesticulating, she’s more in line with a Patsy Kelly or Pert Kelton than, say, a Carole Lombard. The film tracks her journey through getting dumped, losing her job at Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, becoming pregnant from a one-night stand and deciding to have an abortion on Valentine’s Day, with scatological free-association her preferred coping device.

Obvious Child is equal parts a comedy about a young woman struggling on the periphery of show business (akin to last year’s In a World…) and a sensitive study of oddball Brooklynites facing trials alone (Mutual Appreciation, Gayby). Though at times it feels like one of those movies where everyone in Brooklyn knows each other, and where Donna’s support network consists of stock characters (sassy gay friend, feminist pal prone to diatribes), the sitcom glibness is counterpoised by the expertise of the character actors. As Donna's parents, Richard Kind and Polly Draper contribute volumes in their limited time, suggesting credible hereditary ties. If Slate is rubber-faced, then Kind's features are even more pliable; a scene where he charms her with a puppet highlights their shared comic mobility. David Cross, as an acerbic club manager, places her comedy on a continuum with Woody Allen’s via jokes about therapy, the evils of the West Coast, and with his own—his attire at the end of the scene would give Tobias Fünke pause.

Above all, Obvious Child is a testament to the capacity of character acting to come in even the unlikeliest vessels. The same point is made by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s The Japanese Dog, which moves us from the hipster-quipsters of Williamsburg to hardscrabble Romanian villagers, in particular Mr. Costache, an elderly man who has recently lost everything (including, we surmise, his wife) in a flood.

The Japanese Dog

Played by Romanian stalwart Victor Rebengiuc (Medal of Honor), Costache remains a husky oak of a man, taciturn and resentful of charity and advice. Like De Sica’s Umberto D., his days are occupied with the necessary tasks of survival and the quotidian interactions of a decimated community. So purposeful is he that for the bulk of the film, we see little evidence of “acting,” with no extraneous words or gestures. It’s not a typical character role, but it’s marked as such by his age.

The very young and very old share many affinities, one of the film’s most delicate observations. Costache and his grandson Koji (Toma Hashimoto) are instantly simpatico, perhaps bonded by their shared outsider standing in a world where juveniles and elders are perceived as needy dependents. Likewise, children and seniors tend to fall automatically into character conceptions (or how else to explain the supporting-actor billing of Edmund Gwenn and Tatum O’Neill at the Oscars?)

Rebengiuc undercuts apprehensions of dotage by creating a minimalist portrait of a man with basic needs and sublimated yearnings. Pride and loneliness are his defining traits, though the latter comes to light only faintly, as in a stolen moment after his family returns to Japan when he activates the titular object, a robotic dog left behind by his grandson as a remembrance. Costache sets it on a table, observes it, then extends his arm protectively as it nears the edge. At last he holds it close, cradling it as he would his beloved “Koji-baby.”

Moments like this make The Japanese Dog more Ozu-like than the saturnine fare one often expects from Romanian cinema; if there’s a political dimension, it’s certainly muted. But formalistically it’s true of its type, with wide angle shots and dim lighting that preclude revealing close-ups. Rebenguic finds opportunities to let us into Costache’s private world, though, as in an instant at his wife’s grave when, wearing a borrowed jacket whose sleeves are too short, his eyes flicker toward his son and back to the headstone, waiting for his son to step away.

Michael Caine likes to say that movie stars tailor their roles to fit their images, while actors modify their natures to suit the demands of the part. Character actors straddle the gulf, sometimes welded to one personality, sometimes free-floating between a multitude. Regardless, they give films their texture, their flavor. Without them the soup would be unpalatably bland.

Buzzard, the new feature from Joel Potrykus (Coyote, 10; Ape, 12), follows Marty, a dead-eyed bank temp with a penchant for small-time scams. When he's not bilking businesses out of their cash, Marty (Joshua Burge, haunting and charismatic) subsists on a diet of pizza, heavy metal music, and retro video games. After one of his schemes backfires, he hightails it to the home of his equally maladjusted co-worker Derek (Potrykus).

Friendless and effectively invisible, he wanders around in a purgatorial state of mind somewhat between adolescent recklessness and the unfair realities of adulthood. Potrykus’s unflinching approach to the subject matter and his sincere respect for his aging slacker antihero make Buzzard an affecting character study. It’s a fearless and moving exploration of a man whose smug ambivalence masks an inner rage, a disdain for a larger system that seems content to swallow him whole.

FILM COMMENT chatted with Potrykus, whose film screens in New Directors / New Films, about geek rage, slacker rebellion, and the cathartic power of spaghetti.

This is one of the most sincere meditations on loserhood that I've seen in a while. On the one hand, Marty’s a glazed-over underachiever, but he's also almost admirably committed to the scams he pulls. He seems to want to be a winner, even if it’s on a very minor scale.

A lot of people put my last film, Ape, in the category of slacker life—that he was just a wandering loser—and a lot of people say the same thing about Buzzard: that he’s just this aimless drifter. But for me, I totally relate to Marty. I see him more as a petty idealist. He has his set of codes: they might not be lofty goals and he’s not out to change the world, but he’s out to change his world in any way he can. He doesn’t care if he steps on other people on the way. There’s that scene where he gets quick-changed by the cashier in the gas station, and he’s so confused and upset because he’s like: “Hey, you’re violating the code of the little guy. Don’t do that.” Marty’s got aspirations for something different. I wouldn’t say he’s a loser, he’s just totally misdirected in his anger and all of his little scams, as silly and small as they are. But I know those guys.

Buzzard isn’t a movie about self-loathing. Marty’s not a happy guy, but he doesn’t hate himself. Was it always an active decision to avoid indicting the character? Were you ever in a situation where you felt you were running the risk that people wouldn’t relate to him at all?

There are a lot of different guidelines that people follow when they’re writing a script or making a film. A lot of times it’s that they have to see the lead character as likable. You want to root for him. And for me, it’s never been about making a nice guy or a likable guy. I can understand if people don’t like Marty, and I can understand if people do like Marty. I get both sides. But I just want to make a character that people know. I want people to empathize. Why would I want to make a movie about someone that I don’t like and that I don’t understand and that I don’t empathize with? That just seems kind of cold to me. When you’re making a film, you put your heart into it. I understand Marty. I know his world.

You're willing to show him as he is—eating spaghetti with his mouth open and spilling it all over himself. It’s not flattering, but you're never mocking him.

For me, that’s like the opposite of mockery. That’s Marty at his only happy moment. Truly, he’s so happy. [Laughs] He’s in a clean bathrobe, he’s smiling. When we shot that, the scene in the script just says: “Marty eats the best plate of spaghetti he’s ever had.” While we were filming, Josh [Burge] started eating, and he just started shoveling it in, and I was mesmerized watching. The crew was all looking at me to say cut, and I was like: “No. What’s happening right now is amazing. You can’t script this. Look how happy Marty is! He’s loving this. This isn’t Joshua, this is Marty right here.” It’s a very polarizing scene, but for me it’s super-critical that we enjoy this spaghetti with Marty and have a laugh and see him happy for once.

There are also these moments when he’s talking to his mom where he’s almost lying for someone else’s sake—not for himself or for any idealistic goal. And you don’t hear the other end of the conversation.

I always intentionally do not put the other person’s voice on the phone because I think it’s a lot stronger just to listen. We’re seeing Marty’s world from his perspective. With him speaking on his phone to his mom, everything’s not filled in. He’s filling it in for us, giving us little clues about his childhood. That’s where the underlying sadness is. In these phone calls, you’re not sure if he’s lying just to make her proud of him, because he’s ashamed of himself, or because he doesn’t know how to tell the truth anymore. I like those scenes. I think they’re some of the more emotionally complicated stuff I’ve ever done. And Joshua did a good job speaking to himself on the phone.

There's a strong feeling of what you might call "nerd rage" flowing through the film. It's present in the heavy-metal soundtrack and in some of the particularly obscure gadgets—the Nintendo Power Glove plays a major role, for example. Are you someone who’s immersed in retro game culture? Did that inform the writing process?

None of that is really intentional. As silly as it sounds, I’m just making movies that I want to see that don’t exist out there. A lot of the time, it’s just totally subconscious. When we decorated Marty’s apartment, some of the crew came over the next day to see what we had done, and they were like: “So, you just moved your bedroom into this other bedroom.” [Laughs] I don’t profess to be some kind of retro geek, but I have all of the video-game stuff. I know that scene and I know that culture. I just assume that every teenager spent his formative years in the basement chugging Mountain Dew and eating pizzas and playing video games. In Buzzard, these guys are obviously in some kind of absurd state of arrested development that they’re still living 15-year-old lives well into adulthood. I guess that’s my world. I go to horror conventions. I’m all about that.

Buzzard also offers a different take on what you might call the white-collar revenge fantasy. I'm thinking of movies like Falling Down or Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America or even something like Brazil. Movies about drones rising up against the system. Where do you think your movie fits in with this subgenre? This and Ape both cultivate this very specific kind of doomed slacker rage.

I’m not into the faceless villain. Never in my life have I ever met a villain. No one has ever been after me with a mask on. As much as I love Friday the 13th, for me the best villain to me is “the system.” That’s what we’re all fighting—we’re all fighting AT&T, our cable bills, the power company. That’s the villain. That’s the most fascinating rebellion: fighting against this faceless system that’s always been there.

At the same time, Marty doesn’t seem to understand what the system is to a large extent.

[Laughs] He is so far gone. Especially at the end, he’s lashing out against the mom-and-pops. The hotel is owned by a family, probably this nice family. And then at the end, he says “this whole corporate system” and the other guy says “Corporate? I own this place.” He’s so far gone from his revenge ideals that he’s essentially lashing out against one of his own. His motivations and his sense of reality are completely shot by the third act.

Can you talk about working with Joshua Burge? You guys share a lot of time on screen together, and much of it is spent either bickering or shooting the shit or both. Did you guys ad-lib a lot?

One of the reasons I work with Joshua is because he has a presence about him that you can’t teach. He has a look, a persona. Actually, for the character of Derek, we auditioned several good actors, really funny actors. But they were all playing it for funny, making a comedic character. They stuck to the script. Whereas Joshua and I just know each other so well. We rehearsed for eight months on this thing, so when it came time to shoot, we could just ad-lib it. We knew the reason for every scene, what was important and what wasn’t important. We could just goof around. Basically, it was just me trying to make him laugh in every scene. So I’d change the lines every single take. Even if the line was “I’m eating a little chocolate,” I would change what I’m eating and say “It’s a little Bon-Bon Treat Treat” or “Milky Way Num-Num.” And Joshua was stone cold—he would not crack up. He’s a performer—he’s a musician by trade—so he knows how to turn it on and turn it off at the right time.

The Michigan locales are key. The trip to Detroit is a kind of descent into madness. What is it about this city that turns Marty’s paranoia into a reality?

Detroit represents what Marty’s lashing out against: this decay, the mortgages have crumbled, it’s just falling apart. There’s this one important shot that I think only people from Detroit will really understand. When he gets off the bus, the very first shot is him walking in front of the old Tiger Stadium that’s been torn down. It’s now just barred up. And in the background, there’s a huge high-rise casino. And for me, that’s the movie. The old is gone, and all the sentiment is torn out. The good old days are gone, and they’re being crushed by casinos and capitalism and places that are just trying to steal from blue collar folks. It’s really important that the third act took place there. That’s the story we’re telling through the eyes of Marty.

There’s a divide in the film between idle, detached moments and pretty graphic content. How do you negotiate the gap between these very quiet moments and the more extreme situations?

My whole theory of making films is that I want to lull audiences to sleep—I almost want to bore them—and then right before they fall asleep, kick them in the balls. That probably comes from, subconsciously, a lot of my influences. I love The Terminator just as much as I love Down by Law. Those kind of just work their way together. I just love mixing low art with high art. Getting out of all of these genres, mixing tones up, confusing the audience, and surprising them. A lot of people are like: “What is this? This guy’s got his face slashed, and then there’s another scene where a guy is just eating spaghetti?” It’s like Film Comment meets Fangoria.

Six years after the untimely death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) walks through The Babadook in a haze of suppressed agony and stress. She’s falling out of touch with her eccentric 6-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who is having nightmares of his own. And when a mysterious pop-up book featuring a child-snatching bogeyman comes their way, it triggers a fear in Samuel that portends something even worse.

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is a fascinating blend of intense family psychodrama and bite-your-fingernails-off spook-show. Through the use of basic special effects and evocatively bleak production design, Kent conjures a world that is equally realistic and nightmarish. Essie Davis gives a tragic and horrifying performance as Amelia, a woman perilously under the influence, her grip on reality slipping with every waking second. Her struggle is a terrifying display of how the monsters under the bed never go away. They only grow stronger with age.

Just before her film’s New Directors / New Films debut, FILM COMMENT caught up with the Australian filmmaker to discuss the creation of new worlds, her influences from the silent era, and the fraught role of gender in horror.

The whole concept of the bogeyman, at least in American culture, is that he’s never a certain type or shape, and it’s very subjective. Here he takes the form of the Babadook. When did you and the Babadook first become acquainted?

[Laughs] Probably in my childhood. I wanted him to be very amorphous, like you said, something very personal and in the mind of each person. The Babadook started as a feeling more than a physical reality, and in the film the most you see of him is in the book. That was a very deliberate attempt to keep it unclaimed. The entry point of the Babadook is through the child’s imagination.

Did the concept of the book within the film, Mister Babadook, exist before writing the movie, or did it manifest itself as the writing went along?

It was always going to be a film. I made a short called Monster [05], and that energy led to the form of The Babadook, but I needed more in terms of storytelling power. I thought the book would be the best way to introduce the idea to the film that I wanted to put across. We’ve actually gotten lots of requests to publish the book! We had a wonderful American illustrator, Alexandra Juhasz, who we brought over to Australia, because I wanted somebody who understood that the book had to be handmade and have it all in-camera.

I see Edward Gorey in it, and a lot of Lon Chaney as Mr. Hyde in there as well.

Totally. Chaney was the only deliberate reference that I can think of. That ghastly face... That film is sort of lost to us, but we still have the stills of that wild and crazy face. I’m very happy with it.

There are a lot of references to old films, especially to Georges Méliès. He was a magician, and magic is a huge part of the film. He’s referenced many times, and the effects themselves are very simple illusions.

I’m a big lover of Méliès, and what he did for early cinema was incredible. I think that over the years we’ve lost that simple in-camera connection. I really wanted everything to be in front of the camera with very little post-production work done on it. I wanted to give the film a different feeling without resorting quickly to CGI. The energy of his films is very childlike and simple, yet a lot of his stuff is quite sinister by default, so that was very inspiring for The Babadook.

In many horror movies now, you see a lot of docudrama-style camera work. You chose a more still, yet very fluid, style.

I could never see this world in a contemporary way. To have a lot of loose movement simply didn’t suit me, nor did it match the psychological energy of that character. I’ve created a world in which there isn’t a resemblance to a lot of horror at the moment, which is good.

It’s refreshing. You wear your influences proudly, and that’s something a lot of filmmakers can be self-conscious about.

It can be a challenge to be inspired, and to let those inspirations show while owning the film. I felt very confident with the story, and I knew how I wanted to tell the story visually. It’s certainly an interpretation of those influences. I had a wonderful Polish director of photography, Radoslaw Ladcsuk, and we found our own language together. We created something unique to that world.

The whole parent-child relationship occupies a large chapter in the history of horror, and it’s central to The Babadook. What attracted you to that connection?

There is something monumentally troublesome with a mother who cannot or won’t love her child—it’s almost a taboo subject. And part of what makes horror special is that it deals with taboos very well. Horror pushes us up against the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable. I don’t know how it works for other people, but I feel very strongly that people need to face all parts of their lives as much as they can. The Babadook is about somebody who can’t or won’t, or the result is that it doesn’t just knock her for a loop, but it potentially destroys the lives of people around her, and that just so happens to include her son.

You have a good handle on making the drama between Amelia and everyone she comes across as intense as the scares.

I was never really focused on scares, strange as that sounds. I was so focused on the story, first and foremost, as well the horror of what it is to go crazy. For me, the biggest scares come from underneath, with our discomfort with the situation, and how we’re unsure of how to feel with the things we come across in life. I didn’t want to focus on “Oh, I want something to jump out of the closet! That would scare people!” It may be an assault on the central nervous system for five seconds, but to sustain something that’s truly terrifying, you need to have a really strong story. Not that I’m averse to that h-word, “horror,” but it’s nice to have it be something more as well. I think that’s what made Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby so creepy as well, and why it’s sustained over time.

Would you say you identify more with Samuel or with Amelia?

I probably was a lot like Samuel as a kid. I was always inventing things. I used to take bikes apart and make go-carts and cause my mother a lot of anxiety. The main difference is I had a very loving mom, and a mom who I could love. I certainly didn’t suffer the turmoil that Samuel does. There are definitely some elements of me in Amelia as well. As a writer, you do inject your own experiences, not that I know the feeling of going psychotic. [Laughs] But I certainly relate to all the characters.

Your identification with a young male character really speaks to The Babadook’s themes of gender.

With Amelia, a lot of her problems stem from this “female” thing of saying: “Oh, I’m fine. I don’t need help. Everything is fine.” Suppressing all the darkness. Amelia, on the inside, is definitely crying for help. Men do that, too, but women do that in a different way. Horror can address that dark side of being female more so than other genres.

She wears pink, which is the stereotypical female color, but it does have a way of suppressing the darkness.

Her whole identity is built around caring. She’s a nurse, and she’s very altruistic, at an expense to herself. I think that’s why, at the end of the film, there’s such an explosion of the “Other.” She’s been hanging on for dear life to be this “good girl” image, and it was only going to burst eventually, whether the violence was going to be taken out on herself or on others.

The blue within the house is also very striking.

A lot of my influences are black and white, and my producer was nervous when I suggested the idea of shooting in black and white. I went back and thought: “Let’s create a different world that has color, but is really reduced, and not through postproduction, but actually in the design.” I had a genius production designer, Alex Holmes. We talked about how I wanted few colors, just variations on cool blue and burgundy. We stuck with those two colors in varying shades, and then black and white. The world itself that was created has a feeling of coldness and claustrophobia, and I think it’s one of the few films to do that. I see a lot of grain in horror films, and a lot of treatment in postproduction. I wanted the colors clean. Let the whites be whites and so forth. We wanted to put across that this bleakness is what Amelia’s worldview has become. We could add contrast, we could add the light pink. I nearly gave the production designer a nervous breakdown, but we’re both very happy with how it came out.

Essie Davis gives such a powerful and truly exhaustive performance. I see both Jack and Wendy Torrance from The Shining all rolled into one.

She’s extraordinary, a very underrated performer. I used to be an actress, and I went to acting school with her, and I’m just amazed by her talent. She disappears into any work that she does. She’s someone who can really travel around, going from somebody who’s really suppressed and timid and a bit of a doormat into somebody who’s sort of monstrous. A lot of women are not prepared to be that ugly or threatening. She’s incredibly brave and I owe a lot of the film to her and her courage.

The first thing we see after the opening credits of Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery are, I am not kidding you, the words “Nigger Joe’s”—it’s the name of a saloon, hand-painted on the window. Though we are often apt to overestimate the naïveté of past generations, leading off a movie in such a fashion wasn’t a decision that any relatively worldly person could make in 1933 without recognizing that it was an affront. It’s a rude welcoming to a rough-and-tumble milieu in which accustomed social niceties have no place.

The Bowery

The Bowery is set in New York in the Gay Nineties, the period when, as an opening intertitle explains, the Bowery was “The livest mile on the face of the globe.” Our introduction to the Bowery is scored to a cacophony of song: a singing waiter accompanied by a cross-eyed violinist massacres “Daddy’s on the Engine.” A flatulent oompah band blats down the street. A tenor caterwauls “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” An off-key chorus line shimmies through vaudeville club banger “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.” And all throughout the film, snatches of the 1891 hit “The Bowery” are heard on squeezebox and rinky-tink piano. The sentimental balladry starkly contrasts life on the street, where we see a rake swatting a tart in the fanny with his cane, only the first of many instances of offhand violence against women. Elsewhere Jewish tailors forcefully waylay a potential customer, a Black Maria is loaded with whores, and a swarm of “Chinamen” pursue a tow-headed preadolescent rascal named Swipes (Jackie Cooper). Swipes in turn takes shelter behind his protector, Chuck “Mayor of Chinatown” Connors (Wallace Beery), popular owner of a saloon that boasts of serving “The Largest Schooners of Beer in the City.” Inquiring into the cause of this commotion in frightful pidgin Chinese, Connor learns that Swipes has been throwing rocks through windows all around Chinatown, and he admonishes his pupil to behave. “But Chuck, it was only a Chink’s winder!” says Swipes, who shortly after boasts of trading “cigarette pictures with da Guinea kids.” For those keeping score at home, this is three ethnic groups insulted in 10 minutes of screen time—and I neglected to mention that Connors blackjacks a boozy floozy into unconsciousness.

A 35mm print of the gleefully offensive The Bowery will be showing next Tuesday at BAMcinématek as part of a program called “Under the Influence: Scorsese/ Walsh.” The series pairs parallel movies from the two New York–born directors’ filmographies: the night after The Bowery, BAM will screen Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, his 2002 opus set in Lower Manhattan during the Civil War years.

Like The Bowery, Gangs takes place in a New York that is less of a simmering melting pot than a volatile, experimental chemical combination threatening to explode. And though The Bowery may be the Walsh film that Gangs most closely resembles, Scorsese’s film draws quite freely from other works which defined the mythology of New York during the latter half of the 19th century: not only the 1928 book from which the movie takes its title, the first of journalist Herbert Asbury’s several collections of largely apocryphal underworld lore, but Luc Sante’s 1991 compendium Low Life, and the films of another New Yorker a couple of generations Walsh’s junior, Sam Fuller. A key reference is Park Row, Fuller’s 1952 saga of newspaper circulation wars in a New York City roughly contemporary to that of Walsh’s The Bowery. Self-producing for the first time, Fuller blew his bankroll constructing a studio replica of the area around City Hall that was the locus of the city’s newspaper business, while Gangs is centered on the closed world of Manhattan’s Five Points district, built on a Cinecittà soundstage by production designer Dante Ferretti.

Gangs of New York

Scorsese understands, as did Walsh in The Bowery and Fuller in Park Row, the role that these public spaces played as stages on which ambitious men and women could assert their personalities and impose their wills on the people. His film’s antihero, Daniel Day-Lewis’s nativist bully and Tammany Hall ward-heeler Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, strides across Paradise Square with the same air of propriety seen in Chuck Connors, whose renown is in no small part based on his acumen in the fine art of face-pulping. Perhaps not coincidentally, Brendan Gleeson’s shillelagh-wielding enforcer “Monk” McGinn in Gangs bears a passing resemblance to Beery, though it’s Bill “The Butcher” who has Connors’s drive for infamy, reinforced by a talent for violence. “You know how come I stayed alive this long?” Bill explains to Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), his protégé and would-be assassin: “A spectacle of fearsome acts.”

The Bowery, Park Row, and Gangs are all interested in publicity and self-promotion in American life during the era of yellow journalism and ballyhoo, the direct progenitor of our own modern mass-media culture. Thanks in no small part to headlines and those cigarette pictures that Swipes is trading in, celebrity was suddenly possible on a heretofore unknown level, and certain of the same real-life characters crop up in these three films: P.T. Barnum is on one of Swipes’s pictures, and in Gangs we hear tell that Barnum’s Museum has been burned to the ground. New York Tribune founder and publisher Horace Greeley appears as a character in Gangs, and as a sacred name spoken in hushed tones in Park Row. And in both Park Row and The Bowery, one Steve Brodie appears. Brodie was a real historical figure who achieved genuine fame in summer of 1886 for jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and surviving—a feat he may or may not have really pulled off. He’s played in Park Row by George O’Hanlon, and in The Bowery by George Raft, the actor with the cunning greyhound face, famous for his gangster roles and gangster pals.

The Bowery, that opening intertitle explains, is “the cradle of men who would later become famous,” and fame is Brodie’s foremost ambition. We meet him before his name-making jump, when he’s a sharper angling to replace Connors as the Bowery’s big man. This competition for the limelight, for the honor of being the foremost man in the Fourth Ward, is at the center of the film. Appearances count for everything in the public theater that is the street; as Connors puts it to Swipes, he’s always got “a reputation to t’ink about.” Connors and Brodie are both showmen, stewards of their own legends-in-the-making abetting the authorship of tall tales about themselves as they move through life, ever conscious of their own press. (“Read all about me, me eyes is tired,” says Connors to one of his ever-present cronies, while the ascendance of his chief competitor is announced by the headline “Steve Brodie Becoming Popular on the Bowery.”) Even in the Gay Nineties, it seems, there was an art to building your brand. Brodie always announces his entry into a room with a little signature soft-shoe, and both men have their own catchphrases: Brodie’s is “Don’t ever say I never give ya nuthin’,” while Connors is prone to repeating himself (“T’ink nuttin’ of it, t’ink nuttin’ of it”; “Poifect, my lad, poifect.”), a precursor to GoodFellas’ Jimmy Two-Times.

The Bowery

Connors and Brodie’s ongoing struggle for reputation and adulation is the narrative spine of The Bowery, which is constructed as a series of bouts. When Connors becomes a boxing promoter, taking up the management of a pug called Bloody Butch, Brodie arranges for heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, “The Boston Strong Boy,” to retire Connors’s fighter with one punch. When confirmed bachelor and misogynist Connors takes up with Lucy (Fay Wray), a clueless innocent who’s been cast helpless onto the mean streets, Brodie starts paying her court. (It’s not much of a competition, as Beery resembles porridge molded into human form.) Connors is far more rattled, however, when Brodie wins away the loyalty of Swipes, with Beery showing something uncomfortably close to the hurt of a spurned lover. (This was the first of several pairings of Beery and Cooper, who would respectively play Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins in the following year’s Treasure Island.)

Aside from this, the most disturbing battle in the Connors-Brodie war occurs when their volunteer fire brigades come to blows over who gets to put out a burning building on Mott Street, and receive the attendant credit for heroism. As Connors and Brodie’s cliques turn away from the fire to clobber one another with brickbats, Walsh cuts repeatedly to three Chinese men hanging out a window of the burning building, their cries for help falling on deaf ears. After the last cutaway, there is a wipe to a shot of the building’s charred remnants. There’s no indication as to the ultimate fate of the residents of that Mott Street building, but given the uncomfortable proximity of the flame the last that we saw them, it’s not hard to guess. The fire-brigade brawlers are splayed out all over the trash-festooned street, looking for everything like hungover revelers after a spree. It’s a tricky scene to parse; I can tell it’s horribly racist, but I’m not sure who it’s most racist towards. If Chinese men are seen as expendable, white men are seen as uncouth, undisciplined idiots.

A variation on the brawling fire brigades scene appears in Gangs of New York. There are no doomed Chinese this time, but casual violence abounds in Scorsese’s film, like the rock caromed off an unsuspecting Irishwoman’s face just as she disembarks in the Port of New York. This brutal pie-in-the-face is so blunt and abrupt that, in the half-dozen times that I saw the movie theatrically, I heard more than a few shocked half-laughs. The film is funny, queasily funny in the way that Scorsese’s movies habitually are—anyone expressing surprise that The Wolf of Wall Street was an outright comedy only showed that they hadn’t been paying much attention. I can think of no director who populated his filmography with stand-up comedians as Scorsese has, including comedian protagonists like the latter-day Jake LaMotta and Rupert Pupkin, and actual stand-ups in acting roles: Las Vegas legend Bernie Allen in Raging Bull, Henny Youngman in GoodFellas, and Don Rickles in Casino. Even the grandiloquent monologist Bill “The Butcher” is a sort-of insult comic, with a gift for turning the memorable phrase. “On the seventh day the Lord rested,” he opines to Amsterdam, “but before that he did, he squatted over the side of England and what came out of him... was Ireland.” Elsewhere, watching a black man dancing in tune to an Irish fiddle, Bill describes the scene as “rhythms of the dark continent, thrown into the kettle with an Irish shindig, stir it around a few times, poured out as a fine American mess.”

Gangs of New York

Between putdowns, Bill enjoys striking the elegiac tone, knowing well that his day is coming to a close, that the New York public is changing, and that fame is fleeting—and Connors too feels the fickleness of his audience. Brodie does his famous stunt on a dare from Connors, and wins his saloon in the process. This elevates Brodie to top dog on the Bowery, and reduces Connors to the status of has-been. He only recaptures his reputation by besting Brodie in a disputed bout of fisticuffs, though the rivals reconcile with a newfound mutual respect based in the vigor of the contest. (This is echoed in Gangs, in Bill’s nostalgic remembrance of his great, departed rival “Priest” Vallon: “That was the finest beating I ever took…”). As The Bowery closes, glory-hounds Connors and Brodie have swapped their gambler’s finery for the uniform of Uncle Sam, and are marching together towards the Cuban front of the Spanish-American War. Martial heroics are another surefire way to stay in the newspapers, a fact well-understood by the most famous American of the first decade of the century to come, Theodore Roosevelt.

Walsh, who was born in 1887, certainly must have remembered the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor and other key moments in the public life of the period he is depicting, though as son of a successful men’s clothier, his own social background was squarely between Roosevelt’s and Connors’s. Walsh was steeped in his native city’s stock of history-turned-legend, and had begun depicting it as early as 1915, reenacting the 1904 wreck of the paddle steamer General Slocum in his film Regeneration, which was shot on location in the streets of the Lower East Side. The tumult of those streets evidently left an indelible impression on Walsh, and in works contemporaneous to The Bowery, like Me and My Gal (32) and Sailor’s Luck (33), he would try to reproduce the riotous atmosphere and contentious racial jibing of the overcrowded, hot-headed LES. In their democratic bustle and buckshot-blast offensiveness, Walsh’s pre-Code works are simultaneously some of the most and least racist movies ever made in America. The Bowery is a trampling, brawling, insensitive film, but there can never be any doubt that Walsh loves this scene, guys with names like “Googy Cochran from Joisey City” and “Mumbo,” German brewers speaking Katzenjammer Kids patois, and everything else that composes what Bill calls the “fine American mess.” (The nearest modern equivalent to Walsh’s Pre-Codes might be HBO’s Eastbound & Down, with Danny McBride’s sacred monster hero Kenny Powers.)

The Bowery was released in fall 1933, a scant few months before Joseph I. Breen arrived as new head of the Production Code Administration and began more vigilant policing of the Motion Picture Production Code. It is safe to say that Walsh’s movie, if it had been greenlit at all, would not have been made in anything like its present form after mid-’34, for among the points on the 1927 Hays Code that were now to be really and truly off-limits included “willful offense to any nation, race, or creed.” On the face of it, this may seem like progress, though it is telling that on the same list one also finds that “Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races)” is verboten. It was an elegant solution to Hollywood’s problem with race relations—cut out race relations altogether!

The Bowery

Today there is no czar of cinematic morality with Breen’s pull, but we are still very much in the age of ballyhoo and circulation wars, and the Internet’s chattering classes have discovered that outrage is big business. It is amusing, then, to imagine The Bowery released today, along with a flotilla of think pieces asking “Does Raoul Walsh endorse Chuck Connors’s behavior?”

The Bowery and Gangs of New York screen March 25 and 26, respectively, at BAMcinématek.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Item of the day: Joshua Oppenheimer will follow up The Act of Killing with The Look of Silence which continues the earlier film’s examination of the Indonesian genocide, this time from the point of view of a family who confront their son’s killers. Oppenheimer describes it as “a lyrical lamentation to silence borne of fear, but also a poem about the necessity and trauma of breaking it.” … Billed as “the very first Persian gangster film,” The Loner is the next from actor-producer Reza Sixo-Safai, star of Circumstance and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. An art-house crime thriller to be directed by Daniel Grove, it features Safai as Iran-Iraq War veteran caught between the Iranian and Russian mafia in Los Angeles, and is described as “Drive meets Taxi Driver set in the opium underworld of Tehrangeles.” Meanwhile Confidence director Maryam Keshavarz is prepping a film inspired by Hot Coffee, the 2011 documentary about the McDonald's lawsuit … Greg Mottola’s next project is Keeping Up With the Joneses, about an unfulfilled married couple who become suspicious of their sexy and charismatic new neighbors. So far it stars Zach Galifianakis and Jon Hamm …

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Jerzy Skolimowski describes his next film, 11 Minutes, as a “catastrophic thriller,” suggesting that the Polish director’s bit part in Joss Whedon’s The Avengers was time well spent … The cast for John Hillcoat’s Triple Nine, a thriller about crooked Los Angeles cops planning a robbery, includes Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Aaron Paul, and Michael Peña … Mohsen Makhmalbaf lives! The Iranian exile is shooting in Tbilisi, Georgia, making his first English-language film, The President, in which the overthrown dictator of a fictional Caucasus country goes on the run disguised as a street musician and discovers the daily reality of the common people …

Vincent Lindon

Everyone Else writer-director Maren Ade is underway on Toni Erdmann, another film about a strained relationship, this time focusing on woman whose father believes she has lost her sense of humor and proceeds to bombard her with jokes … John Travolta and Ethan Hawke will team with Ti West on In a Valley of Violence, “a revenge Western film set in the 1890s.” … The White Knights, by Our Children director Joachim Lafosse, stars Vincent Lindon as the director of an NGO orphan-rescue mission in Darfur and Valérie Donzelli as a journalist who covers what proves to be a botched operation …

Amy Schumer

Tilda Swinton, Bill Hader, and Brie Larson will join the cast of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck, a vehicle for breakout stand-up comic Amy Schumer, who wrote the script ... Roman Polanski is planning a stage musical version of The Fearless Vampire Killers … No pointless remake this week, but stay tuned…

What are Elaine May and Stanley Donen up to? Read last week's news digest...

Jessica Oreck’s third feature is a mesmeric journey through the unidentified forests, fields, and cities of an Eastern Europe—still spooky with historical trauma, the pleasures of routine and ritual, the pursuit of wild mushrooms. It’s an essayistic assemblage of a past eternally present in the commonplace sights and sounds of traditional dances, prayer candles, firewood carts and trolley cars.

The spine of the film is an animated re-telling of the traditional Slavic folktale of Baba Yaga, a witch with the fungal facial features of an old tree stump who forces a lost brother and sister to complete a series of tasks or else suffer her wrath.  Oreck’s approach is grounded in personal reflection and a fascination with how nature shapes customs and culture. Excerpts from the likes of Theodor Adorno, Czeslaw Milosz, and Olga Tokarczuk appear in voiceover and on screen, leading us through, as one quotation has it, “dense forests of thought.” 

Over a wide-ranging conversation, FILM COMMENT journeyed with Oreck to learn about her haunting film, which screens March 22 and 24 in New Directors / New Films.

In watching and re-watching your film I’ve realized how generous it is. It’s a movie about certain emotions that come from the everyday but are hard to talk about in the everyday. So they have to be transmuted into fairy tales, phantasmagorical stories, things like that. Along these lines, how did you decide to tell the Baba Yaga story as an animation?

It’s hard to remember how the animation came about; so much of my work is intuitive, so much of it I don’t remember actually writing, I don’t remember editing, it just sort of happens. I do my best work when I’m sort of slightly asleep and I can channel this other entity, that has nothing to do with me, that wants to make this film. But the decision to animate the fairytale came pretty early on. I love the work of Ivan Bilibin, who was a Russian illustrator at the turn of the last century, and we used his work as our guideline. Then we found an illustrator, Devin Debrowolski, and it was an incredibly difficult process, it took us years to do. Michelle Enemark was our animator and we took Devin’s illustrations, which were built in layers, and put them in the computer. She did an amazing job and added a lot of the atmosphere.

The first three shots of the film—the open door of a balcony with billowing curtains—almost look like a miniature.

That was in Euskara, in Ukraine, where we were staying in this old hotel—a holdover from the Soviet-era, a perfectly intact time capsule. We just walked in and the breeze was blowing through those curtains and Sean [Price Williams], my cameraman, and I looked at each other and set up the tripod right then. We hadn’t even set our bags down. Then later that same week at that hotel was where the wedding took place. We asked if we could shoot it and they said absolutely. Which was a lot of the way this film was made, stumbling into different situations.

It’s as if the movie is partially about the experience of making it. Could you talk about shooting footage where you’re reacting to something that excites you, and that then becomes part of the film?

To me, that is why I make films, the actual process of getting to know a culture, getting to know people, getting to experience something outside of my everyday reality. That is also what the film is, in a way: we were on this weird adventure, we had very specific things that we had planned to record but a lot of it was stumbling into whatever was intriguing in the area where we were filming. For Beetle Queen (09) Wim Wenders’s film Tokyo-Ga was the exemplar of what I was trying to do. Looking back at that movie you can see so much of it is just him thinking: “Oh, this is interesting, I should record that.” It’s about the content but it’s also about the process of collecting the content.

The narration and the fairy tale were both similar processes of obsessive collecting. My first trip was to Romania and Hungary in 2009 and the first couple of weeks I was in Kluge. Andrei Codrescu had set me up with a bunch of poets there so I sat around with these poets for a couple of days and went mushroom hunting with them and hung out with them and talked about the forest and mushrooms and about fairytales and all the things I thought the film was going to be about. And because of them, the film took on its on shape then. A lot of the dialogue we had was incorporated into the voiceover and while we were shooting we would ask people to tell stories about different things that had happened to them over the course of their life. The fairytale became an amalgamation of both the traditional fairytale structure as expounded by Vladimir Propp and other folklorists, and then I would take some of those stories people told me and incorporate them into the fairytale.

There are moments in the fairytale, for instance, when the father gets taken away at night and the grandmother says: “That night They came for father. It was always night when They came.” Which somebody had said to me: “It was always night when They came,” and I thought that was such a potent description, it was just “They” in the story, she never said who it was.

When you’re traveling, inaction can be as important as action, and the unspoken relationship between yourself and your surroundings, even with all the astounding new sights and experiences, can leave a deeper mark than any adventure. There’s the contemplative aspect of going on a trip, taking a walk, a hike, where you’re sent back into yourself.  

I think that being in a place where you’re challenged to understand what’s going on, what people are saying; to be very immersed in something but very alone in it is an experience I seek out on a regular basis. I love that, I love being a stranger. It forces a lot of self-reflection a lot of times, especially when you’re sitting around and everyone else is speaking a language you don’t understand and you’re picking up body language and tone and inflection. But you’re also completely outside of that world, and you’re surrounded by people but totally alone. That’s a really isolating but wonderful feeling to me.

The idea of a stranger among familiars comes up countless times, when the camera as stranger is met by the gaze of another. Like the little girl with the pigtails staring into the camera.

And her grandfather, with those blue eyes.

And the grandfather is playing the violin, and that fades out to be replaced with a piece of the electronic score.

Some of the score is licensed but a lot of the score is sound-alikes we made, but, I mean, very loosely sound-alikes. My cameraman was also the music supervisor, if you can call him that. He’s an obsessive collector and collects music like no one I’ve ever known. He had this collection of, I don’t even know what the genre is, music from Russia and Ukraine and Poland from the Eighties that we would listen to incessantly while we were driving. He would listen to it while he was shooting, and I was listening to it while I was editing, and I made the composer listen to a lot of it so that he could integrate the feeling of that music.

It seems like the film might be about the pain of nostalgia, which is a kind of melancholy.

It’s interesting, it’s not sad to me in the same way that, I don’t know, falling in love is. Falling in love is such an interesting experience because it’s so elevated that you think it feels good but a lot of times it doesn’t, a lot of times it’s really painful. To me, nostalgia is like that too, that feeling when your stomach drops away—you hate it and you can’t get enough of it. There’s a real push-and-pull, a real sort of internal boxing match that happens in memory, in general, because it’s so bittersweet. 

Due to digital technologies and changes in modes of production, I think scratched prints, rollouts, dirt in the gate all have a different or added meaning in a film that’s produced and experienced now.

That’s part of the reason we shot on Super 16. We didn’t want it to feel like a new film. Being in those places, it felt like the only way to shoot it was on Super 16. You really are in a strange time warp. You’re in this century and you’re also in the last century.

There’s a scene where bales of hay are being moved, and there’s a big, softly golden flash of a rollout that seems to emanate from the hay itself.

The way that the colors of those flare-outs, those flash frames absorb the colors of the frames on either side—those artifacts of light are, to me, equally as important as the actual image. Because they are that nostalgia—the weird, leftover, bittersweet crumbs of the best cake you’ve ever eaten.

The film starts with a title card that reads “Sometime After the Twentieth Century.”

That was Robert Greene, that particular title, and I credit him fully for that because I think that hugely improved the reading of the film.

Every time you go back to the animation, the transition is a fade-to-black or a cut-to-black and then a fade-up, and then when you return from the animation to the live-action footage, it’s a hard cut. Fading to black reminds me, in the context of the fairytale, of falling asleep, and then the hard cuts feel like a gesture to smash together what’s inside the fairy tale with the everyday.

I like the word “smash.” Because there’s a violence to those two things rubbing up against each other and the slippage that happens in the understanding, in the communication between the two.

Is that the violence of you, the filmmaker, intruding onto the subjects, onto the reality you’re surveying? Or is it in linking any two ideas?

Part of why I make films is—it’s such an anthropological term—I love the thickness of the medium. There are two people sitting next to each other, they’re watching the same movie at the same time, they have completely different experiences, and then those two same people can watch in a different time and again have two completely different experiences. That’s four experiences and only two people, just in case you can’t do math. [Laughs] Obviously this isn’t the case for most films—most films are so heavy-handed that you end up having the same experience over and over again. Specifically, I try to make a film that is malleable, that takes on the shape that the viewer projects onto it, even unconsciously.

What I love is the way that memory smashes into reality, the way that culture smashes into memory, the way that all of the things in the film smash up against each other. And then the way that my idea of what the film is and the audience’s idea of what the film is smash up against each other. I love that. It’s explosive, its exponential, it’s endless; it’s so infinite and malleable. That’s really thrilling to me. 

Taking place in an Israeli suburban town, Tom Shoval’s debut feature juxtaposes a family melodrama with a psychological thriller haunted by the specters of class struggle and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Teenage brothers Yaki and Shaul (played by twins David and Eitan Cunio) kidnap a wealthy high-school girl and hold her in their basement, hoping to use the ransom to cover their parents’ debts. This “master plan,” however, quickly goes awry, and as time passes, they realize that their family home has been transformed into a battleground, where any passing child or neighbor might turn them over to the police.

Unlike recent successful Israeli war movies such as Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (07) or Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (09), which play out in familiar sites of war, Youth can be seen as part of a new wave of Israeli features describing how the ongoing military conflict invades and changes the domestic sphere. In a similar manner to Nadav Lapid’s Policeman (11), Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales’s Big Bad Wolves (13) or Jonathan Gurfinkel and Rona Segal’s Six Acts (13), Shoval’s drama has a melancholic and morbid tone, guided by a suffocating sense that violence could erupt at any given moment.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Shoval, whose film will have its U.S. theatrical release later this year, about the proliferation of violence in contemporary Israeli cinema, the central role Hollywood movies play in the life of Youth’s young protagonists, and his dream project.

As a term, Youth stands for a broad range of ages and as such offers different meanings. Why did you choose this title? Did you have any specific connotation in mind?

There are a few answers to this question. The first is that I wanted to make a film about what it means to be young in Israel, where “young” means between the ages 13 and 18. When you turn 18, you have to serve in the army, and are told that from now on you are capable of protecting the country and its borders. And so, overnight, you are no longer a “youth” but a “man.” There is something disturbingly arbitrary about this transformation. It creates a weird, sometimes absurd, gap between the inner world of the soldier and the actions he is forced to perform on a daily basis. Yaki, the older brother who was recently enlisted, is no different in that sense.

Another possible answer is that the term “youth” refers to the generational gap which stands at the center of the film. The original Hebrew title, HaNoa’ar, is an archaic word used by our grandparents to lament a perceived lack of responsibility and values in younger generations. At the same time, it can also imply “the best of the youth”—the future with all its potential—and there exists a tension between these contradictory meanings.  

Another constant tension which gives the film its emotional depth is the gap between the brothers’ Israeli identity—their language, military service, upbringing, and so on—and their immersion in a fantasy world shaped by Hollywood genre movies. Shaul works at a cinema multiplex, and the tiny room he shares with Yaki is covered with movie posters.

I think you are right that there are two layers to the film: the first is the level of reality—the family’s financial struggle and Yaki’s military service. The film is full of actions and gestures that turn these realities into a very concrete vernacular experience. The second layer is that of fantasy: the siblings immerse themselves in the cinematic realm to escape from reality. They imitate the action heroes they admire by way of body language and tone of speech. So there is a struggle between these two layers and as the story unfolds we are waiting to see whether these two worlds will somehow connect. This can also explain why I chose twin brothers to play the leading roles: one relates to cinema and the other to reality. The film is a juxtaposition of the two options. In the end, however, the gravity of reality prevails. Cinema is not a solution. If you choose to live in a world of fantasy, your sense of reality will eventually become too distorted.

Interestingly, Yaki and Shaul’s definition of “cinema” is very narrow: they only watch B movies or action films. Considering that Youth, as well as your earlier short films, work within the conventions and tradition of art-house cinema, I assume your own definition of the term is much wider.  

While the film incorporates some autobiographical elements, it is not about me. When writing the script I tried to see the world through the eyes of a 17-year-old living in an Israeli suburb. I remember going to American action films and feeling that the suspension of disbelief is most intuitive, as well as pleasurable, in Hollywood cinema. When you’re young, you are fully immersed in the experience.

As a film critic and a film student, I developed a much more eclectic cinematic taste. I love the British filmmaker Alan Clarke, who made Elephant and Scum. Maurice Pialat’s L'Enfance nue was a major influence on Youth. It is a coming-of-age story evoking the same feeling I was trying to capture: that growing up can be like a miracle, but it is also cruel, brutal, and filled with anxieties.

You didn’t mention any Israeli filmmaker as an influence on your work. How do you understand the fact that Israeli films such as Big Bad Wolves, Six Acts, The Slut, The Cutoff Man, and many others present a violent and melancholic portrait of Israeli society, without directly relating to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians?

All the works you mentioned were made by filmmakers from the same generation. We are all in our thirties, which means that we were born shortly before the first Lebanon war broke out in 1982, and grew up during the Second Intifada. Therefore we reflect similar anxieties and impressions that translate into similar stories. The occupation has a constant presence in all of these movies. It is always in the background, in one way or another.

In a central scene in Youth, shortly after Dafna (Gita Amely) was kidnapped, she asks the brothers “Are you Arabs?” to which they furiously reply with “No.” Why did you include this dialogue?

It seems that we need “the Arabs” to project our repressed violent impulses onto someone else. We refuse to believe that we are capable of deliberately inflicting pain on another human being. But sometimes our souls are the ones corrupted.

You did, however, serve in the military, in the IDF spokesperson’s filmmaking unit.

Yes, I did. I was directing propaganda movies, the sort of movies demonstrating how to put on your gas mask in case of a chemical weapon attack. But most of the time I was performing absurd, Kafkaesque tasks like “guarding” empty army barracks.

The society depicted in Youth is militaristic, chauvinistic, and aggressive. Being a young man is challenging, and yet it seems that the brothers have more agency than the girl they kidnapped and victimized.

We live in a sexist society, and I think it is a real problem. But I also think that Dafna is much more than a victim. She is very strong. She is able to manipulate the brothers although her mouth is gagged most of the time. You don’t know a lot about her, but you do get glimpses of her very complicated life. She runs away from home, lies to her parents. In the beginning, the brothers look at her in an entirely instrumental way: they need her to get the money. But after the kidnap they start to see, little by little, that she is not that different from them. She is lost, and is desperately looking for meaning.

You and your cinematographer, Yaron Scharf, maintain a strong emphasis on the body and its anguish. The acting is heavily based on body language and facial expressions rather than on a spoken dialogue. Was that a deliberate choice?

Yes. I love physical cinema. One of the most substantial qualities of cinema is that you can see bodies move. It is all about movement, and the movement tells you everything about the character’s psychology. The physicality offers a pathway into the soul. The way Yaki and Shaul hug each other tells you more about their emotional state than any dialogue between them.

While the brothers’ physicality is youthful and confident, the siblings’ father, Moti (Moshe Ivgy), walks around like a ghost, unemployed and about to lose the family apartment.

I have known people like Moti, who were fired and could no longer support their families. I wrote the script before the Israeli civil protest that broke in summer 2011, when tens of thousands Israelis took to the streets to protest the continuing rise in the cost of living. But I was always very much aware of the problems middle-class families are facing. Like Nadav Lapid and other young Israeli filmmakers—we all saw our parents and our friends not being able to make ends meet. Many of the activists who initiated the protest are filmmakers themselves.

You are a part of a new generation of Israeli filmmakers who started out as film critics in publications like Maarvon (“Western”) or Takriv (“Close-Up”). Would you say that your experience as a critic has served you as a screenwriter and director?

I always ask myself that question. I want to be immersed in cinema in every possible way: writing about films, making my own films, coming up with new theories. Cinema evokes so many ideas and feelings; sometimes you feel the need to write them down, and the beauty of it all is that occasionally just by linking two films together you can create something new.

Would you define yourself as a filmmaker or a film critic?

I see myself making more films, so I guess I would say I’m a filmmaker. I remember they called me to the stage for a Q&A in the Berlinale [at Youth’s world premiere] and introduced me as “filmmaker Tom Shoval.” That was such a weird moment. But I’m more of a cinephile or film  enthusiast. I used to work as a projectionist and archivist in a film library. It is all part of the same passion.

And soon you might pursue this passion with Alejandro González Iñárritu as your mentor.

Yes. It is exciting. I was chosen as one of three finalists in a new mentorship program initiated by Rolex. Apparently they showed him 10 movies made by young filmmakers from all over the world, and he picked Youth as one of his three top choices. I will meet him in L.A. next month and pitch him my new project, and if I am chosen, we will begin a year of mentorship.

Let’s pretend I’m Iñárritu, and right this moment you had to pitch me your dream project. What would it be?

I want to make a modern remake of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana set in contemporary Israel. It will be a black comedy about a girl from a very rich family who tries to solve all the problems of the Israeli society. Her methods become more and more creative, crazy, and absurd. But they do seem to work.

So will she solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Possibly. Money can solve everything, as we know all too well.

Kino Lorber recently signed a deal to distribute 90 titles formally with Palisades Tartan’s Asian Extreme label. Tartan was originally a U.K. distributor that expanded to the United States, but in 2008 it filed for bankruptcy. Its discs have been off the market since then, but under this deal, Kino, in collaboration with Palisades Tartan, will distribute these titles theatrically, on video, and on streaming in the United States, still under the Asian Extreme banner. It’s similar to their deal with Redemption Films, with Kino serving as the distributor of another label’s catalog.

Lady Vengeance

Frank Tarzi, the VP of Acquisitions and Business Development for Kino Lorber took a few minutes to talk about what to expect, and which is a fast and furious release schedule. Many of these titles will be appearing on Blu-ray for the first time, including Park Chan-wook’s grim masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which will be available this July or August. It was formerly only available as part of the Vengeance Trilogy box set. Kino Lorber will soon be doing a stand-alone release of the third part of the Vengeance Trilogy, Lady Vengeance, too.

Sympathy will be followed by Kim Ji-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters on Blu-ray, right before Halloween, and then will probably come Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Doppelganger, which Kino doesn’t think will feature the Asian Extreme branding. That’s a great sign since some past criticism of the Asian Extreme label focused on the fact that its name created exploitation expectations for some serious dramas and art-house movies. 

Shinya Tsukamoto has never gotten much respect on U.S. home video, but Kino Lorber will be taking care of that. Priority titles for them include Tetsuo: The Iron Man, as well as Tsukamoto’s Vital and A Snake in June. Along with the stand-alone releases they’ll also be releasing horror and action box sets, priced at around $30, with potential sets including a Korean horror collection (Bloody Shoes, R-Point, and possibly Face), a Thai horror box set (featuring titles like The Ghost of Mae Nak, The Victim, and P), and a Korean action collection. 

A Snake in June

Streaming is part of the deal, so you can also expect these titles to start showing up on Netflix, where only a couple are currently available, as well as on Fandor, Hulu, and for download on iTunes.

This is pretty much a win-win for fans, with the only bad news being that a few of Palisades Tartan’s titles are still wrapped up in deals with other labels and will not be handled by Kino Lorber. Dumplings, Fruit Chan’s horror masterpiece, is still with Lionsgate (who have, bizarrely, released a version missing the last 50 seconds to Netflix), and A Bittersweet Life, Kim Ji-woon’s MIA gangster movie, is still being kept off the American market due to a complicated remake deal.

What’s going to be the hottest collectible for 2014? Posters for Dante Lam’s newest and most intense action movie yet, Breaking Wind, the story of young buff boys on bicycles. Starring Eddie Peng (All About Women, blood type: AB), Ethan Ruan (Monga, blood type: B), and Carlos Chan (blood type unknown), it’ll be shot in Italy this summer. Expect the name to change before release since that’s also the name of a Twilight parody film, but surely there will be sales posters showing determined young men, bent over their bikes and Breaking Wind. The actors are totally committed to their roles with Carlos Chan vowing to “…go online and watch cycling competitions to get some experience.” Nothing will stop this Method actor from Breaking His Wind like a champ!

Another Promise, the first Korean movie to be funded entirely by crowdsourcing, didn’t turn to the public for financing as a marketing gimmick, but because its subject matter is totally radioactive. 

No producer would touch this true account of a father fighting for justice after his daughter developed leukemia while working in a Samsung semiconductor plant. Hwang Yu-Mi died in the backseat of her father’s cab while he raced to get her to a hospital in 2007, and her dad, Hwang Sang-Ki, vowed to bring Samsung to justice. Everyone said he was insane to sue Samsung, one of the four chaebols, the corporate conglomerates that dominate Korea (Hyundai, LG, and SK are the other three). But Hwang refused to accept a settlement from the company’s lawyers and instead filed a case with The Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service, which ruled in favor of Samsung. Hwang appealed, and in 2011 the Seoul administrative court overturned the decision marking the first time in Korean history that a private citizen has won a lawsuit against a chaebol. The victory prompted close to 200 similar suits to be filed against Samsung and other electronics manufacturers. 

Another Family

Another Promise was released in February, but the movie was carried on only 100 screens, and there were rumors that Samsung put pressure on the media not to cover the film. The situation went public when the editor of NewDaily Biz was ordered by Samsung to remove an article from his paper about celebrities privately funding screenings of the movie. When the editor apologized to Samsung officials for running the article in the first place, he accidentally sent his groveling text message to a reporter at a rival paper, who printed the texts. Samsung has been vocal in their public criticism of the movie, and are appealing the 2011 verdict.

With Hong Kong’s Filmart kicking off this week, the big news is that the Chinese market might be becoming more open, although no one’s exactly sure what that means. Jackie Chan and China’s blockbuster king, Feng Xiaogang, spent the recent CPPCC meeting loudly criticizing SARFT’s censorship policies, and there have been rumors that a movie-rating system is being studied. That would be a huge step forward, but no one’s exactly sure if it’s actually happening. The government recently decided to allow provincial governments to review local Chinese films and apply the censorship guidelines themselves, rather than waiting for the Beijing Film Bureau to do it for them. But no one’s exactly sure if the guidelines will actually be changed or if the same ones are just being decentralized. 

China Film Group, the massive state-run film studio, recently saw Han Sanping, the man who built the Chinese film industry into a global powerhouse where local films account for 71% of the box office, step down and La Peikang take over. No one’s sure what that means either, but change is always good,right? In other news, China Film Group just released the South Korean cut of Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer in China, where it took the number-two spot at the weekend box office, after Need for Speed. With Sony and Disney jumping into the China co-production market and with new distribution avenues opening up, China seems to be changing quickly. But again, what does that change mean?

And just in case you wanted to review the landscape again, Film Biz Asia has a Chinese film industry 101 that gives the current lay of the land. It’s a refreshingly sober bunch of numbers and statistics that mean precisely what they say they mean.

In other Hong Kong Filmart news, let’s face it, the only movie that people are talking about is future trash classic Zombie Fight Club. Lurking firmly at the bottom of the barrel, it has a near-incoherent synopsis, a Facebook page full of zombie art, and a making-of video. Why should anyone care? Because production just wrapped in Taiwan, it stars Michael Wong, and it’s directed by Joe Chien (Zombie 108), and did I mention it stars Michael Wong?

Second Coming

Herman Yau, Hong Kong genre director extraordinaire (Ip Man: The Final Fight, The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) is releasing his latest movie, Second Coming, on March 27. Yau’s first 3-D horror movie it’s getting so-so reviews but it features a 3-D castration scene, and the trailer shows off an inspired bit of eyeball stabbery, as well as a scene that will turn you off of natural childbirth for good.

The Journey

The Malaysian box office is not a thing of beauty, with foreign films usually carrying the day, deep censorship hacking daring movies to pieces, and releases exclusively targeting either the Malay, the Chinese, or the Indian audience. But Chinese New Year movie The Journey, about a Chinese-Malyasian girl marrying a British guy over the objections of her conservative father, has become the highest-grossing Malaysian movie of all time, taking the spot from former winner, KL Gangster which earned $3.5 million. Made for $915,000, The Journey has taken in $5.3 million, which is insane for a film that features mostly first-time actors. Producers Astro Shaw have high hopes for the movie’s overseas prospects because it has cut across cultural barriers and been embraced by all three of Malaysia’s ethnic audiences at home. 

The Seventh Curse

Wisely, Hong Kong’s answer to Indiana Jones, has been the subject of movies like The Seventh Curse  and Bury Me High and now he’s been licensed by Raymond Chow’s Pegasus Motion Pictures. The franchise looks to be getting a reboot with either Louis Koo or Raymond Lam playing Wisely, and either Fan Bingbing or Tang Wei playing Pai Su, the female lead.

After many rumors, much behind-the-scenes fighting, and a lot of jockeying by two of the most powerful hitmakers in Hong Kong, Ip Man 3 (in 3-D!) is finally set to start shooting in 2015 with Donnie Yen playing Ip and Wilson Yip directing. Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen began collaborating with 2005’s Sha Po Lang and went on to make Dragon Tiger Gate (06), Flashpoint (07), Ip Man (08), and Ip Man 2 (10), a string of action movies that turned Yen into the most famous action star in the world, and Yip into Hong Kong’s blockbuster king. In the summer of 2013, rumors swirled that Wilson Yip didn’t want to return to Ip Man for a third installment and that he had suggested that screenwriter, Edmond Wong, direct instead. Or maybe Pegasus Motion Pictures boss Raymond Wong kicked Yip off the project so that Edmund Wong, his son, could direct? Either way, Donnie Yen wasn’t having it, and after a lot of negotiations, Yip returned, Yen returned, and everyone is finally happy to be moving forward.

The Monk

King of Cantopop, Aaron Kwok, is making his toughest tough-guy face as he joins the cast of The Monk, the 3-D action movie from Farewell My Concubine’s Chen Kaige.

The now-annual Old School Kung Fu Fest has announced its line-up for 2014. From April 18 - 20 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, it’ll be projecting a ton of old-school movies, including a tribute to Lau Kar-leung the great Shaw Brothers director who passed away last year. Probably the most influential martial arts director of all time, Lau Kar-leung forged the soul of modern day kung fu movies, and the three-day throwdown will screen his Challenge of the Masters (1976), The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), Heroes of the East (1978), Dirty Ho (1979), and Legendary Weapons of China (1982).  Also screening will be Sammo Hung’s rarely-screened Pedicab Driver featuring a mid-movie smackdown between Sammo and Lau Kar-leung that’s generally regarded as one of the greatest fight scenes ever put on film. In addition, ultra-rare 1983 Korean kung fu flick Canton Viper is being screened for the first time ever in the West. Starring super-kicker and Tae Kwon Do master, Hwang Jang-Lee (who fought Jackie Chan at the climax of both Snake in Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master), it’ll be live-subtitled. 

Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee will be in NYC this week for a barely publicized talk about Zhang’s latest film, The Return, which won’t be screened for the audience, who will presumably just soak up the wisdom on offer from these two master filmmakers.

The title of A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness suggests several things at once: the primitive, the transcendental, a metaphor for cinema. In the triptych by 16mm film heroes Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, a man (composer Robert A.A. Lowe) searches for utopia: first in an Estonian commune, then alone in the middle of the woods, and finally performing at a black-metal concert. An epic experimental film, it’s a sumptuous visual experience that should only be seen projected on a large screen. FILM COMMENT caught up with the Bens while they were in New York for New Directors / New Films, where A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness screens on March 22 and 25.

Where does your sense of what to film come from? What drew your eye at the commune, for instance?

Ben Russell: We have different ways of shooting. I always think about what the image is before I shoot it, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to shoot with Ben, because I think he has a more intuitive relationship to recording the world and producing an image of the world. So in that commune, [to Ben Rivers] you probably shot more than I did, because I always just think about what it means, and what it’s going to mean. I’m several steps ahead of it, whereas Ben films it and thinks about what it means. I’m envious of his relationship.

Ben Rivers: I guess I feel a little freer to trust in my instincts and find images and not worry too much. If they feel right, that’s enough at that moment to then feel like they’re worth recording on film, and then readdress them in the edit. So in a lot of ways, the edit becomes that place where you understand the images.

Russell: But we did give ourselves license with the commune and the solitude, because we’re talking about the Beautiful in some sense, or an idea of the Beautiful, we gave ourselves the liberty to shoot a bit more.

Rivers: Especially with the commune, that was something a bit new to us. Firstly, having two cameras—we each had a camera—and also doing synch sound conversations, so we knew that we’d have to be a bit more liberal with the amount we were shooting. So that was different to the other two parts. For the solitude part [in the woods], we had one camera, and we would set up each shot together, and both look through the viewfinder, so there was more of a mutual consideration over each image. Locked-off images are very different types of images, different ways of keeping time. Then the last part was even more organized because we were bringing in an outside camera operator, so we had to direct him quite rigorously about the kind of images we wanted, where we wanted him to move, and the speed we wanted him to move.

What is that beautiful image? You happened to follow this woman walking, who then goes to see the man lying in bed with the baby on his chest…. or not?

Russell: Or not.

Rivers: We’re setting up parameters within which we can find those images. It’s about setting up a scene. You know if you point the camera here, and move it 90 degrees, you’ll probably be getting what you want because you’ve created the whole environment.

Russell: And we do treat them as images, not necessarily as actions. I’m not sure either of us are really after narrative, or “things that lead to other things” as much as we are after the way that the world translates into a two-dimensional picture plane, and how these things cohere, which isn’t to say that the film is “about” images. We’re thinking about what a body does in the center of a 16:9 frame: how that body moves through space, and how that space changes and opens up and allows other bodies to come into it.

Rivers: Yeah. But the setup does allow for some accident. We set up that shot with the woman walking into the bedroom with her partner and baby. We knew where she was going to walk, and we knew that they were going to have a little conversation when she got in bed, but we didn’t know exactly what they were going to say, or that she was going to give him a little flower. It’s about trying to set up these spaces so that you can then find these magic, beautiful moments within them, be receptive to them.

Russell: And the beautiful image is not a general idea, it’s a really specific idea. The kind of beautiful image that we’re after in that first section is really specific to a collective space, to a social interaction, to a particular kind of light. I mean, there’s no fundamental, essential Beauty—it’s the beauty of that moment in that place.

Rivers: Which is really different from the solitude beauty. We’re thinking more about the sublime, the scariness of certain images of beauty. And in a sense that can carry into the third section, which is less obviously beautiful, but it is kind of beautiful when Rob opens his mouth and there’s this amazing red on the inside of his mouth. It’s a really different type of beauty.

Can you describe how you went about creating the commune that appears in the film, setting up those parameters on a larger scale?

Russell: We looked for a while for an actual place that had people living collectively with the idea that we’d bring someone in, and one of them existed, but it wasn’t our ideal space, and we weren’t their ideal collaborators. [Laughs] So we ended up building something by bringing together a bunch of people who lived collectively in past moments in their lives, or in the present, so half of the people are from a commune-collective in Estonia, which I guess functions in a different way than we are familiar with in the U.S. or U.K. And then there are other folks we brought in, one of whom grew up in a Krishna community in Gainesville. They certainly didn’t understand the film we wanted to make, but they certainly understood that we were there to make a film and wanted them to participate in a certain way.

Rivers: We all lived together for a few days and just had conversations for a few days before we started filming, because we were there for a few weeks. So just like getting everyone used to living together, and getting into the flow of being in this place together, and with us being around. So we slowly started filming, and then the conversations started later.

Russell: And the idea was always to film the kind of material that was happening all the time, and then locate it around a series of conversations that we would ask people to have, not knowing what they’d say, but having an idea of where they might go with it. And the conversations got much better as time progressed, because they got more comfortable with each other, and with us.

Did you have a similar relationship to the black-metal guys? Was it a similar process?

Russell: Yes, exactly the same.

Rivers: Yes, basically the same. In the same way commune people come from other communes, these guys came from other bands, a sort of supergroup. Rob [Lowe, the composer] came out of being friends with Ben quite a few years before the film. He was kind of the beginning and the kind of—

Russell: —lynchpin.

Rivers: Lynchpin? Yeah. [Laughs] He was the lynchpin.

Did you have ideas of what you wanted to explore, and then you introduced Rob to certain situations, or was it the other way around?

Russell: We had a pretty clear idea of what the film was, and then we realized that the film needed to be complicated in some fashion, or that the way we were thinking about it wasn’t complex enough. And it became apparent that we needed to have a non-white lead character because of the various histories of black metal, because of the way collectivity has operated within the West, because of the history of the Romantic sublime—I mean, all of these things. So that was one consideration. But also we wanted somebody who was a musician and had a pretty profound, embodied relationship to performance, and Rob fit both of those poles. So when we were thinking of people to be involved, his name was immediately there. The fact he’s not Caucasian is important, but it’s not the only reason we cast him.

Rivers: Yeah. His performance came first. Originally this film was going to be made in Norway, and we were imagining some Scandinavian guy who lives in the wilderness.

Russell: I went and met an artist who lives like that, and it seemed too easy, too simple. When I was traveling around the Flotan Islands—I’ve told this story a few times—I was taking the bus because it was really expensive, and there were a lot of Afghani and Somali refugees there. They lived in that place, and it seemed like a much more complex relationship to place, and a culture.

Was there any sort of direction when you were working with Rob, or was it more of an idea of what to do?

Rivers: There was quite a lot of direction.

Russell: [Laughs]

Rivers: The first part we filmed was the Finnish solitude part, and that’s totally directed. Rob’s not from the North of Finland.   He’s not an actor, and we didn’t want an actor. We often talked about Bresson’s idea of the model, the blank canvas—you wouldn’t even call them a performer, they’re there, they’re present, embodied in that place. So one of the first things you have to do is have someone get rid of any of their affect, any kind of semblance of acting. It’s almost like anti-directing.

Russell: And that usually involves giving people things to do, activities.

For example?

Russell: Like, row a boat for 15 minutes, and only film a minute of it, and not really say when you’re filming it. I remember seeing Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance where this guy is playing ping pong for like five minutes, and the physical activity forces him to change: he goes from being an actor, to himself, to himself remembering he’s an actor playing. But ultimately it’s just gesture waiting to come out. It’s tougher in Finland because there’s not as much activity to do, but we did read for a while.

Rivers: Sit by a fire, smoke a cigarette. Try not to brush away the mosquitoes all the time.

How much film did you shoot? Because 16mm film feels like a precious commodity.

Russell: Yeah, it is.

Rivers: .It was different for each section. The solitude was, I’d say, five to one. The commune was quite a lot—

Russell: Fifteen.

Rivers: No…! Not that much.

Russell: Twelve? I think we shot eight hours. I think 14 to one.

Rivers: Fourteen to one, that’s a lot. But then the black metal section was two to one.

Russell: The way of shooting was determined by the terms we were shooting in. We had them play two concerts, and that was all we had.

In that black-metal section, I read that you drew a map for the cameraman to move through. I’m interested in this idea of how you’re communicating these things to someone. What were you interested in getting in their performance, not just visually, but in terms of ideas?

Russell: We didn’t want to make a music video, and we weren’t so interested in the performers as musicians as much as individuals involved in an activity. [Bassist] Nicholas McMaster said, the experience of performing is a very individual and singular experience. And because there’s a subtext about the individual within the collective, ultimately the individual is the center of the film trying to figure out where he or she interacts or operates, it seemed important to film the concert in a way that the individual was highlighted. There’s never a shot where you see the whole group at once.

Rivers: Right. And the same goes when the camera goes out into the audience. The camera focuses on the individual experience of being—so they’re all experiencing this collective moment, but also a very individual moment that happens in the cinema and it happens in music shows.

Russell: But that’s why it’s been important to show it in cinemas, because that is the experience of cinema. I had worked with Chris Fawcett, the Steadicam operator, before. He’s great, his job is to do what directors want, so we told him to move as if he was in slow-motion, underwater, and to take into the account the space between figures—

Rivers: —to not be afraid of the black spaces in between people. Because his instinct as a Steadicam operator filming a band would be to move quickly from hands playing to face—

Russell: —to go from one “character” to the next, and we almost wanted the opposite of that.

Rivers: Yeah, the opposite. To film elbows, and then to glide over to the next person really slowly, even if it’s the set. So we drew a map for each track.

Russell: We had a few days of rehearsal, so we got to hear the songs and figure out how we wanted it to be while they were playing.

I feel like there are many moments were you’re embracing this nothing—when he’s in nature, as you say, in the spaces in between the band, and also the first shot of the movie. How did you decide to use that motion and that song to inaugurate the film? It perfectly sets the tone.

Rivers: The song came about through a lucky happenstance.

Russell: Like the same way everything. [Laughs]

Rivers: Because that’s the way we make films. We’re receptive to the gifts of the universe.

Russell: That’s why it’s such a bummer to have to write scripts and prefigure things [for funding], because we certainly didn’t at the beginning imagine that we would open with a figure-eight tracking shot of a lake at dawn-dusk where the trees become sound waves with an Estonian fire song. You’re in the process of filming, and spending time in the place opens you up to the possibilities of all of these things to happen.  If you have it all predetermined, it’s like… pffft.

Rivers: You’re just illustrating. The way we make films is experiential.

Russell: Participatory.

Rivers: And so hopefully some of that is translated into the film itself.

Russell: We had gone at the very end of the shoot in Estonia to see a guy who had a Futuro Finnish UFO-ship house, this utopian architectural space, in his backyard. He had designed covers for an album of classic folk songs that have been rearranged by a contemporary Finnish composer, sung by a youth choir. And the first song on there was a fire spell, an old historic fire spell. For us, fire was always a determining feature of lightness/darkness, etc., and we used that. One of the exciting things of making a film is establishing a time for people to enter into, and the attention that you’re asking the audience to give.  If people complain that a film is slow, but it opens with like a seven-minute tracking shot of a lake… they’ve been warned. [Laughs] You know? We always thought about it as a prologue, to the environment, to the emotional and sonic space of the film.

Out of any possible philosophical idea to explore with film, why did you choose to explore the utopian or transcendental together?

Rivers: Why something…positive?

Yes.

Rivers: It’s so easy to be negative. I think that’s it. We weren’t talking about utopia at the beginning at all. It was something we realized we were talking about later on. We were talking about how to exist in the world with a positive relationship in the world and to other humans, how is that possible, how do you make that work. And thinking about it as something that isn’t necessarily fixed, you can’t necessarily pin down utopia, or whatever you want to call it, these are things you pass through, and you have to take into account the darkness as well to get to the lightness.

Russell: And vice versa.

Do you have any more plans to collaborate in the future?

Russell: We’ve got a spinoff film with the guy who tells the finger-in-the-asshole story. It’s like a psychedelic documentary portrait of him. Is that right?

Rivers: Yeah. Kind of a road movie—

Russell: A pilgrimage. A secular pilgrimage.

What’s his background?

Russell: He’s an artist and a poet. [Laughs] He’s a friend and his relationship to the world operates between the waking space and a dream space. The edges are a bit blurrier for him, and as a cinema subject, it seems like an exciting thing. But more than that, he’s a guy who is really generous and fun, someone we both really enjoyed spending time with, and want to spend more time with, as a human and an image. He’s a storyteller.

Do you have any personal projects?

Rivers: Personally, I’m making a film in Morocco.

Russell: What’s it about?

Rivers: It’s about storytelling. And the title is…

Russell: It’s already got a title?

Rivers: It’s called The Earth Trembles and the Sky Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

Russell: That’s a great title.

Rivers: It’s a big mouthful.

Russell: You should just call it The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

Rivers: Yeah, but I like the preamble. It’s something that Paul Bowles heard in a bar, just eavesdropping on a conversation. That’s my main project. I’m also making a film about an English painter called Rose Wylie.

Russell: And I just finished a short film—23 minutes and 33 seconds—about Atlantis. It’s a portrait of Atlantis. And I’m making a film about gold mining, and men who form temporary communities in difficult situations in Suriname and the Arctic North.

Building mysteries from the stuff of everyday life, Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat consists of a constantly shifting set of contradictions. Set entirely in a small apartment in Berlin during one hectic day and night, it is a portrait of a loving family that also harbors aching loneliness. It is a film of static camera setups that is full of motion, and one in which inert appliances seem to gain a conscious life of their own.

This alien object, which screens March 25 and 26 in New Directors / New Films, is the debut feature of Swiss-born twins Ramon and Silvan Zürcher. Silvan produced; Ramon wrote and directed. FILM COMMENT spoke with Ramon last week about Fluxus performance, the Berlin School, and what it was like having Béla Tarr as a teacher.

Where did you grow up, and how did you get into filmmaking?

I grew up in Switzerland, close to the capital Bern, between Bern and the countryside. At school I studied arts. The main focus was video art, experimental film, and performance. I also studied painting and photography. After those studies I worked for a year, then applied for film school in Germany. In Switzerland there aren’t so many interesting film schools. Then I went to Berlin. And now it’s been seven years I’ve studied there [at the dffb, Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin]. The Strange Little Cat is the film I made before receiving a diploma.

What artists did you most gravitate to in school?

The videos I made were rather surreal, without sound, some of them a little like Magritte. The most important thing I discovered during my studies were the performances of the movement called Fluxus. We had one Fluxus workshop, around eight students. We got some notes which would be the content of the performance. For example, they would instruct you to “eat an orange as if it were an apple.” Another was “hold your hand out the window.” Out of those small pieces, the eight students made one very, very weird improvisation. Those constructed scenes got together in a non-linear and a very improvised way. So it was something very constructed, but also very, very free. That’s something that always interests me, to have something very controlled, and something that is more free, more according to the situation. That experience was most important to me.

This freedom inside of control could also describe the structure of The Strange Little Cat. How did the film come about?

I had made some short films, so The Strange Little Cat is a continuation of those. They had the formal interest of the static camera and dynamic mise en scène, and I wanted to continue that. At school there was a workshop with Béla Tarr, and he gave us a text from Franz Kafka, and I chose The Metamorphosis. I took it as an inspiration, or as the first thing on the white paper, and then I started the journey out of that text. Now the film is very far away from that text.

I wanted to make something that didn’t have many time jumps. I wanted to make something that was real-time storytelling, to create a space which is close to theater, and which doesn’t have a normal way of creating time, building time. And I didn’t want to tell much of a story. It would have hidden stories under the surface. I wanted to create a certain atmosphere and mood in the apartment, to build sculptures of the psyches, mostly of the mother. One day in the life of a family, starting in the morning and ending in the evening. And it’s walking through the apartment, and discovering it, and while we discover it we discover the characters.

What was it like having Béla Tarr as a teacher? Did he see any versions of the film as you were working on it?

He was there for one month to do that workshop. I met him six or seven times. It was mostly pre-production, before shooting but after writing the script. The subject of our conversation was mostly the camera. But also the actors, the physiognomy, their faces. The things we spoke about were very concrete. He told me to watch a film by Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman. The camera concept—I didn’t know planimetric camera [composition]. Béla Tarr explained it to me. He introduced me to thinking of space in a planimetric camera concept, where there is not an angle between the camera and the wall. It’s like in the theater, very flat space. Like in the films of Wes Anderson. To make the room more abstract—when it’s at an angle, it’s more realistic. He hasn’t seen the film yet, because I thought he would come back to school to see all the films. I just sent him a DVD.

There is a lot of intricate choreography of the family bustling about, often scrambling around a single centrally framed figure, who is alone in the swirl of the group. Was that also part of your conception of the film?

That became a topic during the screenwriting process. Loneliness, isolation in a group, became one of the aspects of it. But actually it’s funny to have many people in a group, to have those situations where the people are isolated. That being part of a family, part of a group, does not exclude being lonely. It’s also an aspect of the construction of the dialogue. Often the people that speak, they do it in monologues rather than dialogues. The language doesn’t link the characters but rather makes them even more isolated.

Your camera is very static, with most of the movement happening within the frame. How much of that choreography did you have worked out beforehand?

The first thing was an imaginary storyboard that I had in my head during the screenwriting process. I had an ideal apartment in my head. That apartment didn’t exist in reality, because they are so different here in Berlin. After I wrote the script, I met with the DP Alexander Hasskerl, and we drew up the kitchen and the other rooms. During the storyboarding we made drawings of where the table is, the cupboard, the plant, the coffee machine. That was so we could develop a montage, an editing that is rather economic. Because we knew we did not want to cut much. After the storyboard, I wrote the script again. Not anew, but I changed many things, so it worked with the style of editing. Most of the choreography was thought [out] before, and drawn before.

The apartment was so old, that some days, before the shooting, we couldn’t go there to do the storyboarding because the people had to renovate. So Alexander had software, and he built the whole apartment in it, down to including the height of the actors. He was able to storyboard in a digital way. So our storyboards were a mixture of digital, animated pictures, of drawing and of photography.

Where was the Berlin apartment you shot the feature in?

The neighborhood’s name is Moabit. It’s rather an unknown neighborhood. Not so many people want to live there. It was the only apartment we could find that was not so expensive. Our project was very low-budget: we had €11,000 to use for the rent, the lighting, the gasoline. Very, very cheap.

You really expand the space in the film through the use of off-screen sound. You were the sound designer—how did you approach that aspect?

I thought about the sounds during the screenwriting. I wanted the apartment to be an instrument. The coffee machine is an instrument, a destructive sound. Or the washing machine, the mixer. Or when people throw the rubbish outside. I wanted that there. I wanted to create very concrete noises.

Since you attended the dffb, do you feel an affinity with the so-called “Berlin School” directors who studied there?

In Switzerland the Berlin School films have not been shown in cinemas. When I came to Berlin for school, I discovered that filmmaking. During the years I’ve lived here, the Berlin School’s filmmaking became the most interesting in the German-speaking arena. Angela Schanelec’s films were the most important for me. Also, Thomas Arslan—A Fine Day. I loved it so much.

I thought you might be interested in Petzold because he uses sound, and off-screen sound, in similar ways as your film.

I like Schanelec and Arslan’s films because they are a little bit more open. For me it's very important that after watching a film, you have the feeling of having met those characters. Or having met a way of thinking, or a new way of perceiving the world—a new view. After the films of Schanelec and Arslan, I am more inspired. More fascination, more secrets. I also like the films of Christian Petzold, like Ghosts. I love films which are secrets.

People often forget the etymological roots of the word “festival.” A film festival signifies a technically convivial, joyous occasion, where you may watch, discuss, and (if you’re a distributor) buy movies. The sheer size and machine-like organization of the Berlinale puts it miles away from any idea of, let alone the actual possibility of, festivity. It’s hard to procure press tickets, hard to get to the different venues, and a single minute of delay will earn you a prolonged, excessive wait for what’s called a “late entrance”—just late enough to miss the beginning of a film. Add to that the breathtaking ugliness of the city and the bone-chilling warmth of the locals, and you have a painful and slightly sadistic gymkhana through the German capital occasionally interrupted by mildly pleasurable movies.

With southern Europe charged with Mediterranean laziness and punished with cruel austerity measures, Germany is once again at the helm of Old Europe, a state of affairs that directly benefits the Berlinale. Talks of cuts and other financial hardships, common at almost any other festival these days, were conspicuously absent in Berlin. Yet not even the festival’s evidently generous budget, a bounty that ultimately derives from the brutal austerity measures the German-dominated EU is imposing on southern European countries, averted a shapeless and watered-down selection. The engine propelling the festival seems to be its market, the biggest in Europe after Cannes, even though trade magazines lamented its diminishing returns and every front page followed China and its financial might in the industry. Good films in Berlin were few and far between, and the program felt less like a coherent whole and more of a chaotic constellation of more or less random films. Word of mouth was a more helpful guide than the bible-sized brick of a festival catalog, a testament to the seemingly ineluctable festival tendency to choose saturation over selection.

Beloved Sisters

Besides the already known entries that provided the festival with buzz, the official competition featured an under-hyped title from veteran German TV and film director Dominik Graf. Beloved Sisters chronicles the tormented love triangle between the German literary polymath Friedrich Schiller and two sisters Caroline and Charlotte. With the Enlightenment giving way to the exuberant impetus of the French Revolution, the young Schiller emerges from the shadow of national giant and older colleague Goethe to blaze a trail with his own literary exploits. The provincial town of Rudolstadt proves too small for his boundless lust for life and love; societal pressures are nothing but a nuisance, and the prospect of a polyamorous existence is as realistic as the beheading of a king. The bold irresponsibility of youth soon clashes with the less utopian aspects of adult life, and the triangle that Schiller and the two sisters had promised never to break—one of them will marry him, the other will eventually become his biographer—starts to creak under the strain.

Period dramas usually have a choreographed rigidity, but there’s no stifling the carnal impertinence that energizes every frame of this film. The contemporary resonance of the story lies not so much in its universal and timeless essence but in the way the director brings these historical characters to modern life. While carefully respecting the aesthetic and dramaturgic precepts that the genre requires, Graf, one of the very few directors who successfully avoids mono-dimensional depictions of sexual intercourse, sculpts truly flesh-and-blood characters. Schiller’s literary and romantic entanglements form a magmatic and passionate whole, and the printed word, which is portrayed in the film with ritualistic deference, serves to convey rather than merely mediate the intoxication of love. A work of unimposing power, Beloved Sisters renders its minimal story on the grand scale of a three-hour epic with quaint elegance.

The Midnight After

Hong Kong remains as firmly removed from the draining clichés of the European art house and its tired epigones as it is committed to one of cinema’s founding pillars: entertainment. In Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After, the deserted streets of Hong Kong still exude that sweaty cinematic richness which countless flicks have stamped upon this anomalous and muscular film island. Based on a Web novel by the writer known as “Pizza,” Chan’s latest film follows the cross-section of humanity caught on a bus that a deadly epidemic has somehow spared and isolated, killing everyone else in the city. Though burdened by a limping plot that keeps reinventing itself but failing to add up, the film still sparkles with the pulpy devices of genre filmmaking. Chan handles different narrative and aesthetic registers with unsteady prowess, eventually pulling off a palatable if messy show. The film explores the sociological implications of postapocalyptic individualism by showing the inability of these unlikely survivors to stick together, while offering a happy ending of sorts. Those looking for coherent philosophical conclusions should search elsewhere as the film’s many leads never coalesce into a whole and the very strength of The Midnight After lies in its own disjointed hovering. Characters’ deaths provide for colorful and inventive variations within a story that often doesn’t live up to its wacky aspirations, leaving a disappointing aftertaste.

The Second Game

By contrast, Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Second Game is a film that harbors a multilayered complexity beneath a seemingly linear and uneventful surface. The man behind one of the most inspiring films about history and its arbitrary disputes—2006’s comical 12:08 East of Bucharest—treats the same themes in his newest work. Here the hand of the director is, in at least one key way, effectively absent: what we are watching is archival footage of a historic 1988 match between Bucharest’s two main soccer teams, Steaua and Dinamo. The entire game as broadcast on TV at the time is accompanied by the commentary of the director and his father, who actually refereed that very same match. Heavy snow is falling on the pitch but the match goes on, as the two sides—the Army and Police teams, as it turns out—stoically play a game doomed to surreal stagnation.

Porumboiu’s father reminisces about the vicissitudes that landed him there as a referee, and recalls details triggered by re-watching the match. The son meanwhile deadpans with his subtle but biting humor on the absurdities of the game and its uneventful trajectory, which reminds him of his own movies. At some point the pair hilariously comment on the directing choices of State television, which, in compliance with Communist “spirit,” could not show bad sportsmanship and so systematically cut to the spectators every time a scuffle broke out among the players. A film without direction, acting, or editing in the traditional senses, The Second Game somehow manages to expose the grotesque and surreal aspects of Romanian Communism on the eve of its demise (the match took place a year before the fall of Ceausescu’s regime). Porumboiu questions his role as a filmmaker in a movie where all the action has already taken place and there is no re-writing to change its course. He proves himself once again to be a most refined explorer of that semi-fictional realm we call history.

There are three constants in documentaries about rock musicians. One: an act may present itself to the camera as being highly serious and level-headed, but it only takes one tiny lapse into on-the-road idiocy and that film will inevitably get compared to Spinal Tap. Two: no matter what happens on stage, however spectacular or inspired, what really counts as image-defining performance in such films takes place behind the scenes, which means that an artist’s real skill at projecting a memorable persona will be required when taking hotel elevators or falling asleep on tour buses. Three: we’ve become so over-exposed to musicians who are “real characters,” larger-than-life “forces of nature,” that the only way a performer can hope to look interesting is to project an air of absolute mundanity and domesticity.

20,000 Days on Earth

These rules apply in varying degrees to two new music documentaries. I almost said “music documentaries with a difference,” but then they all aspire to be “with a difference,” more or less. These two really are somewhat singular, though—one because it doesn’t quite resemble anything else in the genre, the other because it purports not to be a film about a band so much as a recreational project by a person who happens to be related to someone in a band.

The first is 20,000 Days on Earth by British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, which closes this year’s New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center on March 30. It’s a portrait of Nick Cave, rather than a conventional documentary about him—and certainly not a history of his career. What historical documentation there is, is largely rushed out with flamboyant profligacy in an opening sequence that blitzes through an abundance of Cave imagery on multiple screens at breakneck speed. Want footage of Cave’s early Australian bands The Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party? Of him dueting with Kylie Minogue, or playing a crazed convict in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (88)? It’s probably all there in this sequence, but don’t blink too much.

Forsyth and Pollard take an unorthodox approach to biography. Their film imagines a representative day, theoretically the 20,000th, in the life of 56-year-old Cave. We see him wake up at home in Brighton, England, and proceed to do what he does every day: as he puts it, “I wake, I write, I eat, I write, I watch TV.” But that’s not all he does. He also drives around Brighton accompanied by various past collaborators—Kylie Minogue, Ray Winstone (who acted in the 2005 Cave-scripted film The Proposition) and former Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld. He also visits current band member Warren Ellis to swap reminiscences about those sacred monsters of live performance Nina Simone and Jerry Lee Lewis, who could scare their audiences and their musicians in equal proportion. He pays a visit to his archive and sifts through moments of his history, explaining the background to assorted photos, like the one of an audience member caught pissing on the Birthday Party’s bassist, the late Tracy Pew.

20,000 Days on Earth

There are various inserts into this dream day: Cave writing and recording songs for his recent Push the Sky Away album, plus some live performance, all the more thrilling because so sparely used. But the most exciting thing, for Cave aficionados and newcomers alike, is a long interview with psychoanalyst Darian Leader, who asks a few pointed questions but for the most part nods sagely and mutely—at the very least, establishing the conventions of an analytic encounter, which allows Cave to talk revealingly about his past. We learn from this session that a man long known as rock’s great cosmopolitan wanderer (sojourns in Brazil, Berlin, Brighton) had a fairly normal-sounding Australian boyhood, with memories of a bridge which local kids used to dive off. Then there were the girls that dressed the boy Nick in female clothes, and a bookish dad who introduced his son to the joys of literature, beginning with Lolita. Cave also discusses the craft of songwriting, with relaxed wit. It’s about counterpoint, he says, about finding elements that spark off each other—“like letting a child into the same room as a Mongolian psychopath.”

Cave admits that it’s part of his profession as a songwriter to “cannibalize” his marriage. He also, touchingly, talks about the explosion of desire that took place when he first laid eyes on his wife Susie Bick—prompting another frenzied montage, of screen and other cultural goddesses. Bick herself is glimpsed in a single photo, but otherwise declines to appear except as a silhouette surveying her spouse from an upstairs window (there’s nothing like maintaining a little mystery in marriage). Shot in atmospheric, grainy ’Scope by Erik Wilson, this elegant study looks less like a documentary than like a highly staged thriller, a piece of brooding provincial noir: driving along a rainy coastline, Cave resembles a hit man off to dispatch some victim on the outskirts of suburban Hove

If 20,000 Days is an exception to the Spinal Tap rule, it’s not because Cave takes himself seriously, but because his dry, acerbic sensibility rises above the routine follies of the pop world. Yes, he has always impressed on stage and on record as the ultimate dark-side rock star, but that’s because he has approached that role from a distance, evidently a man of words first and foremost. We know Cave the haunted soul behind the microphone, but here’s the droll penseur behind the manual typewriter. And he does, as he says, watch TV too: at the end we see him with his twin sons, both in school uniforms, all eating pizza on the sofa. Normality is the strangest touch of all.

Mistaken for Strangers

But what could be more normal for a rock musician than to have a sibling who’s considerably less stylish and less at ease with the world? Matt Berninger is the singer of The National, and the only member in a band otherwise composed of siblings to leave his brother at home. The premise of Mistaken for Strangers (named after a song on the band’s 2007 Boxer album) is that Berninger invites his younger brother Tom on tour to work as a roadie. Tom—an aspiring filmmaker with several zero-budget horror flicks to his name, apparently—decides to make a documentary about his time on the road.

Tom and The National are not an obvious fit. The group are sober, diffident, committed to a poetic, rather earnest style of songcraft, whereas Tom, says Matt, “is more of a metalhead.” Whatever Tom’s talents, being a roadie is not one of them. He’s more interested in living the Tap dream, and in having “a hard alcohol night” with the band—but drummer Bryan Devendorf (imagine a glum, bearded Nicolas Cage after just such a night) is the only member interested in letting his hair down. Tom manages at various points to miss the tour bus and to lose a guest list, leaving Matt’s parents-in-law stuck outside a venue along with Werner Herzog. And no one’s too happy with him filming everything.  

He’s apparently not much good at the documentary thing, either. The film begins with his apparently impromptu attempt to interview his brother. “Do you ever get sleepy on stage? Do you get nightmares? Don’t act like it’s a dumb question.” Matt rolls his eyes: “Do you have a notebook? Do you have any plans for this film?”

Mistaken for Strangers

Whether or not it’s part of Tom’s plans, Mistaken for Strangers soon becomes a teasing essay on sibling tensions, as illustrated by the ultimate indignity: Matt in concert, stalking through the audience as he sings, while Tom trails him to make sure his mike lead doesn’t get caught. The Berningers’ parents appear, an affable middle-class Cincinnati couple, mother Nancy obligingly reassuring Tom: “You were my most talented” (and maybe he was: his cartoons look rather accomplished).

Whatever the history of this droll exercise, and whatever Tom Berninger’s original reasons for undertaking it, Mistaken for Strangers is not altogether what it purports to be—the giveaway being the producer credits for Matt and his wife Carin Besser. After years of being wholly or partly bamboozled by documentaries that aren’t 100 percent bona fide, it may no longer be of much critical value to use terms like “mock doc”—but it’s clear that at the very least, Mistaken for Strangers turned at some point in its making into a very playful masquerade. Only someone very smart and confident would be willing to portray himself as quite so hapless and gauche as Tom does here; he essentially uses the tour as a backdrop for a gonzo self-portrait, a likeably self-deprecating music-biz counterpart to Louis C.K.’s TV shows.

As for The National, you get bits of their music here and there, and the band emerge sympathetically as straight men to Tom’s idiot routine. What’s in the documentary for them? They have one of the most nebulous public images of any successful rock act, and there is no easy way of making this hard-working but self-effacing crew seem terribly interesting as people; Matt’s well-cut three-piece suit doesn’t make him a debonair Doctor Death like Nick Cave, but rather leaves him resembling the senior accountant of an embalming supplies firm. So the most feasible way for this band to look interesting is to be sympathetically dull. The most interesting thing I now know about Matt Berninger is that his home life is quietly suburban (a backyard dominated by his young daughter’s playthings), and that nothing annoys him more than finding cereal spilled on his hotel bathroom floor. I like him all the more for it—but it’s nowhere near as interesting as his brother’s choice of humiliation as an art form, or a career option.

"[Story of My Death's] eventual fictional encounter between Casanova and Dracula represents a key moment in European history: the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to that of Romanticism," wrote Manuel Yañez-Murillo about Albert Serra's latest film, in the March/April issue of FILM COMMENT. "Anticlerical, anti-monarchist, and admiring of Voltaire and Montaigne, Serra’s Casanova serves as a spokesperson for the dying 18th century: a man committed to knowledge and a form of pleasure in which joy and decadence converge. Casanova’s expressive exuberance—embodied in the voice and gestures of Vinceç Altaió—lifts Serra’s cinema to new heights of structural complexity and philosophical density, expressed in a series of rambling yet lucid dialogues. On the other hand, the character of Dracula—played by artist and ‘supernatural biker’ Eliseu Huertas—is closer to the iconic, hieratic figures of Serra’s previous films, although he is a messenger of evil and darkness as opposed to virtue and innocence."

Story of My Death screens March 26 and 29 in New Directors / New Films. The following interview by Ángel Quintana originally appeared in the film journal Caimán Cuadernos del Cine and is used with permission.

Where did the unconventional cross between the myth of Casanova and the myth of Dracula come from?

Everything began after Birdsong [08]. It came out of the possibility of shooting in Romania—I immediately thought of Count Dracula. I amused myself doing something with the theme, even though I must confess I had never been interested in vampire stories. On the other hand, I had been reading the memoirs of Casanova and discovered that, behind his misfortunes, there was something that defied the rationalism of his era. I understood the cross between Casanova and Dracula to be a cross between the sophistication of the Enlightenment and the dark and esoteric side of Romanticism.

Initially you considered Josep Maria Flotats, a veteran of stage and screen, for the character of Casanova, in order to introduce a professional actor to your world of nonprofessionals. Why did you turn him down?

I had been speaking with Flotats and saw that he was a very good person, but I also understood how difficult it would be to integrate him into my “troupe.” In my shoots I need to create a very concrete environment, a kind of collective participation. I met Vicenç Altaió, who is a poet and a person with a great artistic sensibility, and he connected with [the other actors], and because of that I intuited that he would be the perfect Casanova. His presence introduced a very theatrical diction that served me very well.

Story of My Death feels like your most narrative, most constructed film yet.

I wrote a screenplay in order to ask for financing, but at the same time that I was looking for financing, I learned that support was coming in from different regions of France. That aid seemed to suggest that I had to shoot in French locations, which would mean stretching out the first part of the screenplay. The screenplay was modified, but without taking a fixed direction. Until I began shooting, the film hadn’t begun to take a narrative form. Initially it could’ve become many things and gone down many roads.

In the first part of the film, for the first time in your work, the dialogue sounds really elaborate and well-prepared. Did that change how you worked with your actors?

When I see films with professional actors, I get the feeling that they are waiting for what they have to say next, and the film loses its spontaneity. Vinceç Altaió didn’t like to memorize his lines because it separated him from the job of being Casanova. He wanted his personification of Casanova to permeate the atmosphere. Since Vincenç is a man of letters, he spent many months reading everything he found about Casanova. Sometimes he would discover something curious and incorporate it into the dialogue.

Casanova and Dracula are two tales that have already been told many times in film and literature. Did you worry that your film would generate a play of references with other films?

It was a difficult challenge, but I succeeded. The key was finding an equilibrium between the natural and the artificial—creating another iconography. Casanova is old, decrepit, his instances of sex exaggerated. Dracula is sinister, but he acquires an abstract dimension. The important thing was establishing a bridge between the two worlds that divide the film, without causing an interruption. The spectator must undergo a process of immersion that brings them closer to a progressive form of denaturalization—to the break-up of every quotidian element—in order to confront the evil and the horror in visceral form. It’s a film that leaves the realm of life and slowly reveals its desperation. At the end there is no life, only shadows.

At the screening of the film in Locarno, one critic maintained that the film had a tragic dimension...

The most tragic character is Casanova’s son, Pompeu [Lluís Serrat, who played Sancho Panza in Serra’s Honor of Knights (06)]. Somehow this innocent person becomes a victim. In the first part he has money problems, later woman problems, and at the end mental problems that cause him to lose his innocence. His character symbolizes the road down the loss of purity that the film lays out. Whereas the figure of Casanova implicitly offers a reflection on hypocrisy. He doesn’t know when to check his desires, and he becomes a victim of his own fate.

How were you able to synthesize more than 400 hours of footage in editing?

The film was born when I saw the material and began to order it. The first time that I began to envision an outline of an edit, I was surprised by the consistency of the characters. During shooting it was impossible for me to have any precise impression. I only made notes of ideas for dialogue, so that the actors read aloud during slow moments. In the editing I put the finishing touch on sentence fragments that had been said in a specific moment, together with others that didn’t have anything to do with the others. The editing of Story of My Death was genuine agony that lasted almost a year-and-a-half.

The film is extreme, it’s full of possible paths, of scenes that could have their coherence isolated, but these were sacrificed precisely in order to create a coherent ensemble that results in something truly stunning.

Why does the film feel so saturated? Perhaps because it’s the first time that you worked with an original soundtrack?

The sound is a basic part of tapping into the spectator's feelings of powerlessness and provoking their fear. Dracula’s screams are blood-curdling. Whereas my previous films came from a process of “hollowing out,” Story of My Death comes out of a process of overloading. The final section is based on throwing together the horrific, the metaphysical, and the humorous, with the desire to decompose the image until it’s in a realm closer to video art. The film is like a voyage that transports the spectator to the unknown.

Largely because of the advent of digital cinema, the number of indie film productions in China has grown annually, but indie film festivals have been forced to go underground. Indie music festivals once encountered similar challenges, gaining success as part of the local tourist economy but with the understanding that politically sensitive content would be removed. The same situation holds in indie film production today, with compromises necessary in order to have a commercial theatrical release.

Vivian Qu, one of the few producers of independent film in China, has produced films such as Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice—winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlinale. Trap Street, her directorial debut, is a critical look at the role of technology in contemporary life that follows a digital-mapping engineer who becomes fascinated with a beautiful woman he spots in the street. The woman works at a mysterious place called Forest Lane that can’t be registered into the digital map system, and as the engineer’s curiosity about the woman intertwines with his concern about the system, the trap of the title reveals new dimensions.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Qu about her early years in New York, the idea of spying and being spied upon, and life as an independent producer and filmmaker in China today. Trap Street screens on March 28 and 29 in New Directors / New Films. 

Where are you based now? I understand you spent quite a few years in New York.

In 2003 I returned to Beijing where I grew up after having spent some years abroad. I was in New York to pursue my interest in the visual arts, but I discovered cinema. I felt really fortunate because it ended my anxiety of having to choose one thing over another for a career, because all my interests—writing, photography, music, etc.—can come together in one art form. The Film Society at Lincoln Center and MoMA were among my favorite places for films.

How did the story come about? It starts as a story about a man tracking a woman, then slowly becomes a psychodrama.

What I wanted to portray in the first place was this feeling of watching and being watched, which has obviously become one of the most significant characteristics of modern life. Since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this feeling has been reinforced, distorted, and multiplied in many different ways. What propelled such a phenomenon? Can we even find out? The paradox is, today’s technology should enable us to discover truth, but it’s never been this difficult to tell the real from the unreal. I didn’t want my film to be a simple record of a particular event; I want it to be a synthesis of my thoughts and observations. Even if I cannot find the answer, at least I can raise the question: does 90 percent freedom amount to true freedom?

The discovery of the term “trap street”—a fake street inserted on a map as a trap for potential copyright violators–was key to constructing the story. It plays right into the idea of real and unreal.

Guan Lifen (He Wenchao), the woman whom the engineer follows, feels like she comes from a French film from the Sixties—mature, pretty, and always sad.

Are you sure French, not Italian? Actually, when I was in the casting process I told my team that I was looking for a Monica Vitti. It was a bit puzzling to them and someone actually recommended a Eurasian girl. I wanted a woman who possesses not only innocence, but also maturity and complexity. She may not always be sad, but she certainly should do a lot with few words.

The digital cinematography by Matthieu Laclau and Tian Li gives the images a hyperreality, and the lighting is meticulously designed, especially in the dance scene. 

I want the film to be a realistic portrayal of contemporary life. So I treat each scene as a faithful slice-of-life vignette. Although many North American viewers have commented on the film’s noirish tone, I refrained from using lighting as a tool to interfere or heighten the dramatic effect. One thing that my lighting designer and I agreed ever since our first discussion is that we will not use any colored lights. If I strive for anything, it is clarity. I want the audience to see everything yet still not know if what they see is the truth.

Nobody in the film wears uniforms, even those who take the engineer, Li Qiuming, into custody.

I have to be true to reality when it comes to details like this. At the same time I prefer to keep this unintentional vagueness, like many other aspects in the story, because who they are, what they represent, we can never know.

Could you elaborate on your understanding of technology in contemporary life, especially the notion of privacy in relation to technology? 

Is there a fine line between protection and intrusion? No, there is not. It’s a dilemma with which we have to live in our hyper-technological society. I just hope we are not creating a monster that will come back to haunt us in the future. Or have we done it already?

Did you have any expectation that this film could be shown commercially in China before you started the project? Because it seems that political censorship is still going to be there for quite some time, both for domestic and the growing number of foreign films imported from Hollywood and elsewhere.

This is my first film, so I wanted total creative freedom. This is something I discussed with my producer Sean Chen even at the script stage. He was the executive producer of Night Train [2007; directed by Diao Yinan], and did not want these concerns to interfere with my creative process. So he let me do what I wanted and assured me that “we’ll figure out a way somehow.” Otherwise it would be a very different film.

I find one scene quite intriguing, when Li Qiuming's father, editor-in-chief at Woman’s Living magazine, lectures about recruiting women onto the staff, which is all men. Yang Lina's Longing for the Rain, another film you produced, is sort of a feminist psychodrama. Perhaps you could talk a bit about the role of woman in the film business, as well as in the Chinese society.

That’s another paradox in the modern Chinese society. Women have assumed important roles both socially and economically, but in the national psyche, the absence of women’s identity or consciousness is still very much the case. The Woman’s Living magazine scene doesn’t need to be taken literally; it is a joke about this absence. Yang Lina’s film still makes many men uncomfortable. As for my own film, since it hasn’t been shown in China yet, many thought it was just a love story—a “natural” conclusion since I’m a woman.

You've produced several critically acclaimed Chinese independent films, including Diao Yinan's two films, Night Train and Black Coal Thin Ice. How did that experience help with the production of Trap Street?

In all my producing work, I have been very much involved in the creative process, especially with the two works you mentioned. In the process I was able to observe other directors’ strengths and weaknesses and learn from their mistakes. Also I’ve learned how to work under constraints in low-budget films so I can make conscious choices to protect my vision.

Could you describe a little what it’s like being a producer of independent film in China? Where does all the money come from, and how do you make the film sustainable if it is not going shown in the place where it is produced?

Indie productions have their money coming from almost exclusively private sources. Ten years ago foreign funds were an important source, but many of them have been stopped over the last few years. This is why the majority of indie films today are microbudget films. They travel through the festival circuit and perhaps make some sales internationally. The Internet is another possibility but this is rather recent.

Jia Zhangke has talked about the lack of an independent film industry or structure in China. Do you feel the same way?

Yes, absolutely. In addition to lacking the proper outlet for indie films—there is only one art-house theater in Beijing and it only shows Film Bureau–approved films—independent film festivals are not encouraged either. So showing indie films has almost become a private affair. The difficulties in financing these films have made many directors move into the commercial area, willingly or unwillingly.

Which role do you prefer? Filmmaker or producer?

Certainly filmmaker. The filmmaker makes demands. The producer satisfies those demands. That’s why my hat’s off to indie producers: they really make the impossible happen.

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” Enobarbus says of the iconic pharaoh in Antony and Cleopatra, but he might have been speaking of the perennially surprising Tilda Swinton. When I interviewed her, hunched in her black coat at the chilly Sony offices in Midtown Manhattan recently, she seemed scarcely more wearied by life than she did when I first talked to her, an ethereal 26-year-old, on the London set of Friendship’s Death 27 years ago. She was pleased when I recalled our chat on the set of that Peter Wollen essay film—about an encounter between a pacifist alien and a pro-PLO war correspondent (Bill Paterson) in Amman during “Black September” 1970—because it’s a largely forgotten movie she would like to see resurrected and finally released on DVD.

Natural human decay of body and mind has never bothered Swinton’s Eve in Jim Jarmusch’s philosophically ambitious and densely allusive Only Lovers Left Alive. She and her musician husband Adam (Tom Hiddleston) are terminally beautiful English vampires who might have stepped out of a Symbolist painting; as a time-traveler, three millennia old, Eve is a sister, of course, of Swinton’s title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando.

Though devoted to each other, Eve and Adam start out on different continents. As languid as she is enlightened, Eve lives in Tangier, devours books, and hangs out with the undead Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), revealed as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. Adam has wound up as a melancholy drone rocker who lives reclusively in Detroit, where he collects vintage electric guitars, champions Nikola Tesla, buys uncontaminated blood from an unscrupulous doctor (Jeffrey Wright), and bitches about the mess Zombies (non-vampires) have made of planet Earth.

To allay Adam’s blues, Eve pays him a visit. They make love, treat themselves to O-negative popsicles, and cruise the post-industrial dystopia at night—Jarmusch’s camera tracking poetically past Detroit’s deteriorating houses as it did those of New Orleans in Down by Law (86). The couple’s idyll is disrupted by the arrival of Eve’s bored, bratty younger sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), who, unlike her sister and resentful brother-in-law, has no qualms about sinking her teeth into Zombie throats.

Swinton also graces, in a small role, the spring’s other significant American film, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Her Madame D.—surely related to Max Ophüls’s “Madame de…”—is an ailing dowager of Old Europe and a lover and legator of the roué concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes). The film’s 17-person makeup team did an amazing job aging Swinton, who proves a convincing dotard, but the Thin White Duchess of 30 years ago shines through.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Did you create a centuries-old backstory for Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive?

In a completely playful way, Jim and I have been riffing about Adam and Eve’s live for the length of time it took to make the film, which was about eight years. The first premise, of course, was [derived from] Mark Twain’s beautiful Adam and Eve diaries [“Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” 1904; “Eve’s Diary,” 1906], which just set the tone and the dynamic between this curmudgeon and this space cadet. We put a lot of stories from their past in the original draft of the script, paring them away in the many drafts that followed. She’s a Bructeri druid and she’s lived 3,000 years, so we worked that constantly. She’s seen everything. That’s why she’s got her particular perspective. She reads humanity, she reads nature, she reads the past, she reads for an attitude to the future.

And is she older than Adam?

Way older. He’s a baby, 500 years old.

Jim Jarmusch has said that whereas Adam is a Romantic—and he has clearly got that Byronic gloom—Eve is more of a Classicist. She exudes serenity and speaks more to the eternal than he does. When he laments the plight of the planet and what the Zombies have done to it, she tries to comfort him by saying: “We’ve done all this before.” You get a sense from her that the Earth will regenerate itself. Did you talk or think about this?

Yes, we talked about it endlessly. I think there’s something really significant about the fact that he’s an artist and she isn’t. At the same time, there is this primary issue, which is that she’s that old. So the question is, will Adam have the same perspective as she does in two-and-a-half-thousand years? I don’t know. Maybe he will. But if he doesn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would then suggest that that perspective might be something that she has access to because of her position not as a maker, but as a sort of lightning conductor. It’s not quite that she’s an interpreter or translator, but more like she’s the grounding cable for Adam. I don’t know whether he would ever be able to access that because I don’t know whether it’s his place as an artist to be that grounded.

Maybe that’s the nature of their bond, and that’s why they need each other, why it operates, and why it will never stop operating. Because it’s for her to have this literally earthed feeling so that Adam can float and so that he can be caught in his own spirit and not caught in anything else.

Do you think Eve vampirized Adam?

I wonder. Who knows? They are, as she would say, related by blood. Yeah, maybe.

I can imagine that after 500 years, one wouldn’t want to spend too much time with one’s spouse. Whereas Adam chose seclusion in Detroit, she went to Tangier. I assume Christopher Marlowe probably went there for the beautiful boys, like Joe Orton, but why did she?

Probably to meet Rumi or Hafez [13th- and 14th-century Persian poets, respectively]. I don’t know. I think, for company. I sense that company’s extremely important to her, in a way that it’s literally antagonistic to Adam. Detroit was always going to be Detroit, and we knew we needed an old civilization for her. We were going to put her in Rome for a long time and then we started to dislodge that and place her on the African continent. Once we thought of Tangier it felt completely right, because it is such a hotspot and such a space station. When you walk around there now, you really wouldn’t be surprised to find William Burroughs in the corner of a café or Brion Gysin or any of them, even if people have told you they’re not alive any more. That’s why it felt so right to put Christopher Marlowe there. It’s where people who are reported to have died are actually living. So I think Eve went for the society there and she went for the invisibility within the society, because it’s one of those places where you can be invisible. There’s a sort of slipstream that you can move through.

Why aren’t Adam and Eve living together at the start of the film?

Maybe they would say they do. Being apart for five years might be like being away for a weekend for them. I think they do live together in the sense that they are truly married and committed to one another for the long term, but in that extremely sophisticated and mature way, which means that they’re living their own individual lives. They’re not editing themselves in order to carry some sort of oneness idea.

This is the third film you’ve made with Jim after Broken Flowers [05] and The Limits of Control [09]. Do you see Only Lovers Left Alive as more autobiographical than the other two in the sense that Adam and Eve represent different aspects of him?

Well, I met Jim backstage at a Darkness concert and about a week later he sent me a letter asking me to be in Broken Flowers, which was already written and was already happening. So I wasn’t a part of the development of that film at all. I was more of a part of The Limits of Control, but that film was such a particular undeveloped film by its design; it was Jim’s intention to make a film in a manner in which he didn’t know what he was doing. So it was strange. In that sense, it felt extremely autobiographical because it felt like he was looking for cinema. He blindfolded himself purposefully and then felt for that film.

But I would say, yes, [Only Lovers Left Alive] did feel very personal—it’s certainly very intimate and it has a central love in a way that his other films don’t. It’s also true that Sara [Driver, the filmmaker and Jarmusch’s romantic partner] was a huge guiding light on this project and was the person who introduced Jim to the Mark Twain stories. So maybe it is more autobiographical. But I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to judge. Maybe it’s always the case.

When Adam evicts Ava [Eve’s younger sister, played by Mia Wasikowska] from his place in Detroit, she calls them snobs. She’s got a point, because they do exude a haughty, above-it-all otherworldliness. It cautions the viewer not to hang onto their every word.

They are snobs—super snobs. That is the price they pay for having this perspective. Also, I think it’s the way Ava feels about them. She’s very young and still enmeshed with human society in a way that—let’s watch this space, maybe in 1,000 years she will have found a way of mediating with humanity in a less chaotic and dangerous way. They’re safe and also together and have this hermetic seal around them, whereas she’s alone and lonely. Their task is to stay invisible and unreflected and unnoticed. As Eve says to Adam in the club when he’s getting freaked out because his music’s playing there: “Don’t draw attention to yourself.” That’s her modus operandi. For someone who looks as she does to walk through the streets of Tangier without drawing any attention at all shows how incredibly well she does it. That’s what she’s perfected in her life over the centuries. That’s what survival is—this sense of removal and imperviousness.

So I feel Ava is envious of them, but she’s also been “snobbed” by them. Yes she was greedy and drank Ian [Adam’s mortal go-between, played by Anton Yelchin] and she’s a mess and all mixed up, but I have great compassion for her. She hasn’t met anyone who can keep her company through the centuries, so I totally forgive her.

As Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive, you are ageless, but as Madame D. in The Grand Budapest Hotel, you are at the very end of…

I don’t age in that either!

Well, no you don’t age, but you are aged. I wondered if you got a glimpse of how you might appear on film when you’re 90.

One of the things I really love about both of these characters is that they are so young at heart and so in love. They are both ancient young lovers. Madame D., in particular, is like a 9-year-old with half a butcher-shop of meat on her face, who’s all atwitter and scared. I would hope that I would look half as good as Madame D. when I’m her age. She tells everybody she’s 83, but she’s actually at least in her middle nineties, I would say. One of the things that was really beautiful to explore in both of those portraits was the idea that—and this is quite a practical observation that I’ve made over the years with ancient beloved people in my life—real spiritual youth is gained latterly. That is something that I really wanted to just flick into being in these two people. It’s the idea that when you are that old, that’s when you can really love, really appreciate nature, really be grateful and full of wonder.

Orlando

Throughout your career you’ve played characters who have a certain exquisiteness to them, going all the way back to Edward II [91] or Orlando. I’m thinking as much about their looks and style as much as their personalities. Is it sometimes a relief to you to play characters who are much more raw? I’m thinking of Ella in Young Adam [03], for example.

Or Julia [in Julia, 08]?

Yes, characters that enable you to get down and dirty. Does it come as a relief to you to throw away all the maquillage?

It feels pretty much the same deal. It’s always a disguise of a sort and it’s always a revelation of a sort. It’s just the dial is twisted to some different level. None of them feel less constructed than any other and none of them feels less real. It’s just a different look and a series of different gestures. So, no, not particularly, they’re just different shapes.

You’ve done much to preserve Derek Jarman’s memory and, indeed, you talked about him at South by Southwest in March. I know you were close friends, but can you possibly isolate what it was he contributed to your own development as an actor, in terms of freedom and trust?

First of all, I would say that preserving Derek’s memory is not the point. Talking about him—you know, whenever I’m in a position of talking to young filmmakers, students, whoever and they’re looking or asking for some example—is about disseminating the fact of Derek, because he’s still so much alive. I’m on the faculty of Béla Tarr’s film school in Sarajevo, and when I was showing Derek’s films to the doctorate students there, so many of them had not heard of him, which is not to their discredit but it says something about history. It’s 20 years since he died and it’s never going to be not necessary to keep perpetuating [his work]. It’s not preserving, it’s just keeping it, throwing it out there, because it is that modern and it is that relevant and powerful. As I think I said at South by Southwest, the significance of Derek is that he shows that there was a time when a self-determining artist like him was central to the culture. The proof was that he was completely torn to shreds by [the Thatcherite Oxford historian] Norman Stone in an enormous article in the [English] Sunday Times [January 10, 1988].

But what did he do for me? He gave me this completely unique opportunity to find out what I was interested in and not pay attention to what I wasn’t. There’s no question in my mind that I would not be performing at all if it weren’t for Derek. I was on the verge of never performing again when I met him. There wasn’t a cinema at the time that I felt I could be in, and I didn’t want to be an industrial performer or actor. He was the first and only person who said: “Well, OK, let’s look at what you do want to do. Let’s just build on what you are interested in.” That meant being silent, for a start, or just moving or looking into the camera. All my references as a performer and as a cineaste were silent movies, so he said: “Let’s do that. Let’s build on what you feel strong about.” Who else would do that for someone who was a completely unconstructed actor but almost too cine-literate for my own good at that point? He made all that a strength and made it possible for me to find my way through.

He did that for other people, too. Sandy Powell, the great costume designer, who has gone on to work with Scorsese, built her own voice through her experience of working with Derek. Caravaggio [86] was her first [feature] film, as it was mine, as it was Simon Fisher-Turner’s [as a composer]. So many of us started with him—John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans. He was so empowering. He made filmmakers of all of us, which doesn’t mean to say he made us directors, but we were all filmmakers. He gave us responsibility for our departments, which was hairy a lot of the time because we were a bunch of kids. He would say: “Go away and make these costumes and come back and we’ll use them.” Of course, occasionally he would filter but he wanted us to share in the authorship.

The Last of England

Which of his films gave you the greatest opportunity to experiment?

Particularly those I call the home movies, The Last of England [88], our segment of Aria [87], and The Garden [90]. I’m sure people think I’m splitting hairs when I say I’m not an actor, but the reason I say it is because when you look at that early work . . . that’s not acting, that’s performance. It would be way too pretentious to call it acting. So to work with him was the only way I could find out how I could do it at all. Because if he hadn’t invited me into the kindergarten, I would have never got the chance.

In Pierre Bayard’s 1998 Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, a closer-than-close reading of Agatha Christie’s 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, psychoanalyst and literature professor Bayard expends considerable space on the subject of the book’s narrative ellipses, its lies by omission. These are the spaces in which Christie’s narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, who is eventually unmasked as the book’s murderer, can conceal his guilt. They are also, for Bayard, indicators of a far larger world which exists beyond the parsimonious few details that Christie, by way of Sheppard and investigator Hercule Poirot, have chosen to share with the reader.  

What a blast Bayard could have with John McNaughton’s Wild Things, a film that flaunts its narrative obstructions, is defined by withholding. These are the spaces in which McNaughton conceals his crime. As the movie parcels out fragmentary and downright deceitful information to the audience, its true narrative—that is, the information that would allow us to understand what exactly is going on and who is behind it—remains safely hidden in its ellipses. Rather than offering resolution, the final “What’s in the Box?” revelations of what was concealed in these blind spots only reinforce our sense of how little we know of the whole story. Released in early spring of 1998, a full year before The Sixth Sense ignited a rage for twist endings, the final daisy chain of gotchas in Wild Things raised the narrative rug-pull to a level of overkill that approached the sublime. But more on that anon.

A 35mm print of Wild Things will be screening at the IFC Center this Friday and Saturday, as part of the 12-film “Fatal Attractions: Erotic Thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s” midnight series. The selections hearken back to a pre-Internet moment when the average American consumer would’ve had to pass through the saloon-style double-doors of their video store’s Adult room in order to partake of hardcore gratification. A good many consumers dissuaded by this still sought illicit pleasures, and this created a demand fulfilled by a category of socially acceptable quasi-smut, NC-17 or Hard R-rated films that would be filed in sections with names like “Spicy” or “After Dark.” Their commercial purpose was the sale of peekaboo titillation, but at their best they allowed for real cinematic sensuality and frank examinations of the intermingled roles of lust, power, and money as motivating forces in society—all of which largely disappeared from mainstream American movies when sex was ghettoized into porn, readily available via broadband without risk of judgment by teenaged clerks. Yes, the erotic thriller section was a lawless, liminal zone in which films like Sliver, Body Heat, and Poison Ivy—all part of IFC’s program—could be found in the odd company of Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence, Ken Russell’s Whore, or even Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses.

In the erotic thriller, very often sexual capital and social aspiration were as complexly entwined as those well-toned bodies on the video box art, enjoying simultaneous arched-back orgasms on artfully rumpled satin sheets. Wild Things lays out its scenario in affluent Blue Bay, Florida—actually the Miami neighborhood of Coconut Grove standing in. Its principal characters are representative of the city’s have-nots and haves. The players’ actual motives, as well as the network of secret treaties that bind them together, will come into view only gradually, like the antediluvian visage of the alligator that emerges from the water of the Everglades with the opening title.

Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is the guidance counselor at Blue Bay’s high school. A onetime Teacher of the Year, he’s also the resident Romeo at the local country club where he’s been shopping for a moneyed wife. One of Sam’s students, Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), has developed a smothering crush on him. Sam’s seen to deflect her flirtations, but then one day Kelly accuses her teacher of raping her after she’d hosed down his Jeep for a charity carwash. Because Kelly is from an influential family of local land barons, and because her mother (Whore’s own Theresa Russell) is one of Sam’s spurned ex-conquests, the full force of the Van Ryans, with the weight of a ton of money behind it, is brought down on him. (The original script by Stephen Peters added in some backstory about crooked real-estate development and generations-old grudges, lost in the shooting.) Detective Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) is put on the case, and appears to have locked it up once Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), a goth teen who lives unsupervised in a trailer on the outskirts of town, reveals that she had an unmistakably similar experience with Sam. When cross-examined on the stand by Sam’s el cheapo ambulance-chaser lawyer (Bill Murray), however, Suzie unravels and confesses that she was paid to perjure herself by the Van Ryans. This is the first and not the last instance in the film where “coming clean” only reveals another layer of dirt.

We never see what happens between Sam and Kelly after that carwash; we only see her entering his house sopping wet, with intent to seduce, then emerging with a ripped blouse and sprinting off down his street. Such withholding maneuvers occur throughout the film: we’re allowed only an obstructed or fractional view of events, then after the fact presented with paltry evidence and the unreliable testimony of the witnesses to establish what happened. An off-screen “murder” is abstractly rendered with a streak of what might either be blood or red wine. An exchange of gunfire in a guest house is “seen” from outside, in classic “Wild Bill” Wellman style—we can only make out struggling silhouettes and hear a pattern of shots that doesn’t entirely coincide with the police report given afterwards.  

While the seemingly guileless Sam’s innocence is by no means certain, he’s the nearest thing to an identification character that we get for the film’s first act—but as Detective Ray later cautions one of Sam’s former students: “People aren’t always what they appear to be. Don’t forget that.” Sam, Kelly, and Suzie were actually working together the whole time, fishing for a big payday from Mrs. Van Ryan, which is what they get after she settles Sam’s defamation suit. In celebration, the three rendezvous for a motel-room threesome, replete with a topless champagne shower and the most famous late Nineties girl-on-girl tongue-tangle this side of 1999’s Cruel Intentions. Later the movie will offer up a slab of full-frontal Bacon in a scene that briefly dangles the possibility of a homo conspiracy between Sam and Ray, though it doesn’t explicitly penetrate any further into the matter. (One ellipsis that’s never satisfactorily explained: what happens to Sam when he’s dumped into a jail cell with a tough-looking, burly dude whose greeting is “So you’re the new chicken-licker?”)

Because of its reliance upon lip-smacking, sweaty-palmed moments like Wild Things’ motel interlude, the erotic thriller wasn’t a genre generally afforded much respect in its heyday. For those of us who grew up with these movies as our smut du jour, however, prurient interest has (partway) given way to serious consideration—I am writing this shortly after the publication of my colleague and contemporary Adam Nayman’s book It Doesn’t Suck, a reclamation of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 Showgirls, the genre’s mega-production ne plus ultra. Jacques Rivette’s formulation that Verhoeven’s films are about “surviving in a world populated by assholes” might equally be applied to Wild Things. Playing the title role in McNaughton’s 1986 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Michael Rooker puts the philosophy succinctly: “Look at the world! It’s either you or them.” Suzie would seem to agree. “He had a pretty good line on what cheap fucks people are,” she says when Det. Ray walks in on her reading a dog-eared copy of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, easily the best pop-culture cameo by this scabrous classic until Jess was seen reading it on a bus out of Star’s Hollow at the end of an episode of Gilmore Girls. Suzie is the only character in the film who betrays any indication of ever having read any book—in fact, her mockingly wielding her knowledge of the Classics over Sam is the last thing he’ll ever hear—though like everyone else in Blue Bay, she lives her life to a soundtrack of truly terrible period alternative pop. (She’s listening to “Not an Addict” by K’s Choice when the detectives walk in, only a minor improvement on the Smash Mouth cover of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” that Mr. Lombardo is heard blasting in his Wrangler.)

In watching the threesome, the sort of thing that critics often tut-tut as egregious, it’s worth noting just how much characterization McNaughton can pack into a sex scene—the two encounters between Uma Thurman and Robert De Niro in his Mad Dog and Glory (93) are another example. It’s a particularly delicate job in Wild Things because not only are we dealing with a volatile triangular relationship but, as will be revealed by the film’s conclusion, we’re looking at three people who are all presenting false fronts to one another, even while acting on presumably genuine horniness. “They were acting!” as Det. Ray shouts at his partner in a later moment of “revelation,” “They were all acting!” He is full of shit himself, of course—after Sam’s true colors are revealed, the movie will repeat the pattern of alignment and disillusion with Suzie, odd woman out in the ménage à trois, whose victimhood would seem to confirm her innocence, and with Det. Ray, who wears the mantle of authority.

Setting the film in an environment of total deceit gives the performers a fair amount of leeway. If Campbell, with her blazing Manic Panic ombre, drawn-on study-hall henna, Sharpie hieroglyphs on her blue jeans, and chipped-off black nail polish, seems a bit too studied in her tetchy mania when recounting the night that Sam raped her, well, this can be chalked up to the fact that Suzie is in fact performing—and, moreover, giving a performance that’s meant to be partly transparent.

The lead-up to this scene shows McNaughton’s ability to casually sow backstory, establishing time, place, character. Det. Ray and his partner (Daphne Rubin-Vega) arrive to question Suzie, stopping first to talk to Ruby, the proprietress of “Smilin’ Jack’s Fish Camp,” a honky-tonk/ roadside-attraction alligator farm that abuts the trailer park. Ruby is played by Carrie Snodgrass, whose worried blue eyes leave a deep impact in what might have otherwise been a throwaway role. Ruby works with Walter (Marc Macaulay), a dullard whose exact relation to her is as uncertain as Ruby’s is to Suzie. While Walter puts on an impromptu show for the cops, pinning an alligator’s snout closed with his chin, Ruby sends them on their way, tossing a few quips after Det. Ray that speak of a dicey previous history: “You know the way… You won’t shoot her, will ya?”

From the time of the cops’ first pulling up to their leaving the trailer with Suzie, we move from daylight to nacreous dusk to night, and DP Jeffrey L. Kimball, a repeat Tony Scott and John Woo collaborator, handles the transition elegantly. In a few minutes, everything that the film does well is on display: the shrewd use of character actors, the awareness of imminent danger, the sense of nightfall and an emerging double-life, and grudges left to fester in the shadow of power.

Wild Things is a startlingly lush Panavision production, all tropically wet greens and blues. The image it will likely best be remembered for, though, is Richards emerging from the high school swimming pool in slow-motion, wearing a sky blue one-piece with a ludicrously transparent top, all to the baritone of Morphine’s Mark Sandman. The spell is immediately broken by some corny double-entendres about “your breaststroke,” but for a moment you’ve got a piece of ensorcellment that rivals the matching of Patricia Arquette and Lou Reed’s “This Magic Moment” in Lost Highway (1997).

If not precisely Lynchian, there were, in retrospect, some rather startling formal games being played in the erotic thrillers of the period. I will never quite forget the conclusion of another seamy, Florida-set sex-murder movie of 1998, Palmetto, in which the protagonist, played by Woody Harrelson, finishes a screenplay based on his life experiences and then starts writing his dream cast by typing out “Woody Harrelson.” (The only twist more shocking is the film’s opening title: “Directed by Volker Schlöndorff.”)

Wild Things does this one better: After a series of double crosses have winnowed the group of conspirators down to a lone victor, a series of vignettes cut in with the closing credits take us back before the beginning of the movie and carry us all the way past the end, illustrating how exactly the thing was planned and executed. Having built a number of lacunae into their movie, McNaughton and Peters provide us with the missing text at the last possible moment—the crucial puzzle pieces which the other conspirators died for lack of having. I’m not going to re-trace the narrative convolutions, because it’s best to keep these pieces at under 50,000 words, but suffice to say that the film’s final girl is the archetypal Nineties Final Girl, the “Sidney Prescott” of the ever-more-wretched Scream films, Ms. Neve Campbell. Only Suzie, the mastermind, had the entire scheme doped out in advance—everyone else had been briefed on their own role and knew their own lines, but they hadn’t gotten to see the whole script.

When watched again, Wild Things doesn’t become an entirely new movie as Suzie: Portrait of a Serial Killer. At least not in the sense that Christie’s Roger Ackroyd is “explicitly composed for the sake of rereading,” in Bayard’s formulation, or that viewers flocked to The Sixth Sense to make sure that yes, I’ll be damned, nobody but the kid ever does talk to Bruce Willis. Watching the maneuvers of Blue Bay’s conniving actors again with eyes open to what’s actually going on and who’s actually calling the shots, we only learn that they are Method actors who stay inside their roles—at least when the camera’s on them. For example, even with no one watching to benefit from her scene, Suzie seems genuinely flustered after Det. Ray questions her about involvement in a possible conspiracy, though the questioning is all part of her plan coming together.

Not only does Wild Things willfully deprive the viewer of the information necessary to positively ID the real mastermind in advance of the final unmasking, its concluding recap doesn’t really jibe with what we’ve seen in the preceding movie. It’s implausible, for example, that Sam and Suzie could fake Suzie’s death in the short time it takes Kelly to go and collect a tarp from her mother’s Range Rover, and even more implausible that Suzie, whose bleary-drunk POV we’d looked through earlier, could suddenly be so sharp and calculating as we see her in this flashback. The film closes with the other survivor, Murray’s shyster lawyer, handing off the big payday to Suzie in her new Caribbean retreat. How did he get in on the plan? What did he know and when did he know it? No amount of re-viewings will extract this information from the swampy murk of Wild Things. Lucky, then, that the movie is as voluptuous as it is, for this becomes the true measure of its rewatchability.

Regular updates during the Syrian civil war have detailed the shifting fortunes of the major factions, reported on battles for vital territory, tallied the mounting civilian casualties, and charted the humanitarian and refugee crises. The steady stream of reportage could lull us into thinking we wave a handle on the situation, that we understand what is happening in Syria and what motivates the various players. But while these reports at first can shock, and inspire active concern, over time the ceaseless flow and detached remove of the accounts ten to habituate us to the situation, as the reality turns into an “ongoing news story.” An initial sense of outrage toward injustice in Syria is pacified, eroded by the familiar, hedging, filtered, moderating reports we read.

Into this desensitized journalistic context, self-described media activist Talal Derki launches an explosive assault with Return to Homs, one of a select few nonfiction entries in New Directors / New Films 2014. Eschewing impartial reportage for visceral on-the-ground sensation, the Damascus-born Derki drops the viewer in media res with handheld camerawork, covering (among other things) shootouts that are as adrenaline-pumping as any Hollywood action movie. But the blood is real, the bullets kill, and whoever’s behind the camera better get out of the way of that tank.

In lieu of analyzing conditions across Syria and the historical roots of the conflict, Derki focuses on the city of Homs, a hotbed of dissident activity that he visited on and off during three tumultuous years, 2011 to 2013. Derki cobbled the film from his own footage, along with video shot by other participants in the war. He embeds himself in a local revolutionary cadre, adopting a hybrid role that fuses the observational perspective of a reporter in a war-torn hotspot and the active engagement of a committed member in their ranks.

On his first visit to the city, Derki finds a youthful non-violent social change movement openly parading through the streets, ebullient with the collective certitude that a new and better order is right around the corner. On subsequent visits, Derki finds the buoyant spirits have fallen as the revolutionaries have dug in for the long slog, their pacifist inclinations shed as their peaceful overtures were met with repression and violent retribution by the central government. Basset’s all-male unit transforms from a ragtag band of idealistic youths into battle-hardened seen-it-all vets, urban guerrillas slipping like ghosts through the crumbling architecture of their leveled neighborhood. Leading the group is the charisma-oozing star-goalkeeper-turned-rebel-leader Basset, a soulful 19-year-old with curly locks and a voice that could melt butter.

Framing the events in ways that recall war films, Derki presents frenetic gun battles and artillery assaults, capturing on sometimes grainy digital film his “characters” as they scramble on the battlefield or drag fallen comrades to safety amid the crackle of enemy fire. Balancing these intense scenes are the calmer intervening moments, during which the men horse around or affect bravado or, more rarely, turn contemplative as they muse on the situation. Basset emerges as a heroic figure and the film’s potent emotional core, a stand-in for the aspirations of the Syrian everyman. With death-defying—if not suicidal—bravery, he comes off as a first-into-battle leader who longs both to repair his country and to return to a simple life.

Derki makes plain his sympathies with the rebels, and beyond that, he inserts himself directly into the film. Certain sequences are accompanied by his voiceover explaining the extent of his involvement in events. Others feature him on screen taking part in the action and talking as a close friend to Basset. There is clear advocacy (some might say propaganda) in this approach, but unlike many other documentarians who cast themselves, Derki brings less ego and stridency to the screen. Instead of trying to tip the scales on centuries-old partisan divides with hyperbole or snark, Derki presents an intimate, inside view of distant events in order to electrify us with their vivid reality and awaken new depths of emotional and social engagement.

Return to Homs carries the risk of sensationalizing current events and feeding our insatiable appetite for close encounters with violence from the safety of a movie theater. Yet it also presents a perspective on a pressing reality that may otherwise escape our attention. A film like Return to Homs can endure as an accessible and enduring account of the Syrian war, offering a powerful, meaningfully shaped narrative that also speaks to our era of citizen media.

A local dandy, riding home from afternoon tea, finds himself suddenly and uneasily sharing his prize mare with an amorous black stallion. A teenager is ordered to help restrain a man who has inexplicably dropped to all fours in a fast food line. An academic, held in career limbo by his government, trades empty bottles for coins and dreams of having his work published abroad. These moments—drawn from three films in this year’s New Directors / New Films—present vastly different societal panoramas, yet what they have in common are their settings in varyingly insular communities. Whether from neighborly vigilance or the apparatus of a totalitarian state, these characters know their movements are subject to constant review. That knowledge affects every facet of their conduct—they navigate social orders in which private lives are lived and judged publicly.

Of Horses and Men

The Icelandic countryside of Benedikt Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men seems at first too expansive for such concentrated scrutiny. Set against sprawling and sometimes forbidding backdrops of rocky plains, the villagers live close to the land and in harmony with the horses that seem to outnumber them. No one appears eager to embrace the 21st (or even the 20th) century; steeds and tractors comprise the only evident modes of transportation, and fences supply most of the conflict. But as is the case in tight-knit societies, individual failings do not escape the notice of the locals, human or otherwise.

Indeed the proximity of man and beast, and the blurring of those categories, has seldom been expressed with such earthy authenticity. The film’s aim is not to romanticize in the manner of Black Beauty, or make symbols of its equine characters as in War Horse, but to affirm traits in animals that we, out of perceived supremacy, tend to deny. Above all is a sense of self-possession; Erlingsson’s horses are misused but never misled. Each vignette begins and ends with a close-up of a horse’s eye, its human’s intent literally reflected in the orb—a tomboyish rider applies lipstick to meet her crush, a barb wire fence glints menacingly at a free ranger. The horses’ innate wisdom casts light on the folly of humans, their sighs and snorts foretelling the fate of the best-laid plans nimbly referenced in the title.

The people of the village behave rashly and absurdly, often at their horses’ expense, as when a native with a taste for vodka rides into the frigid sea to procure a bottle from a Russian trawler. Other times they sacrifice their horses for their own safety and vanity (the white mare pays a dear price for beguiling the stallion). But even the most oblivious among them would have to admit they’d be lost without their all-seeing companions.

Frequently Of Horses and Men plays like an interspecies love story. A filly with a lavish blond mane whinnies from afar like an impatient wife; “Coming, girl,” her owner tenderly replies. But Erlingsson never pushes the point to anthropomorphic extremes. The horses impart no wisdom, nor do they fall into quaint pageantry. They function more to animate the setting—to serve as living landscapes, beautiful but wild, wordless but alert. Attempts at mastery are laughable, a message Werner Herzog might embrace. Humans are the same beasts everywhere—prideful, hapless, periodically cruel—and horses suffer them with weary dignity.

History of Fear

Benjamin Naishtat’s History of Fear by contrast takes place among the guarded buildings and patrolled streets of Buenos Aires, where even the open spaces feel confined. Like Erlingsson’s film, it evolves episodically, less a fluid narrative than an escalation of mood. From the introductory helicopter shot, with townspeople informed via loudspeaker that they’ve been evicted from their plot of land, the prevailing sense is of unchecked, top-down dominion, making no allowance for frailty or contingency.

Most residents accept their hardships without protest. During an infernal heat wave, power blackouts are common and fearmongering fuels all entertainment. (“Show your ID!” perpetually issues forth from a TV set, where even the dance shows seem fascistic; this tenor of programming blends with the multiple glimpses of closed-circuit footage to suggest that anyone on camera is up to no good.) Scenes play out as brushes with authority—state, social, or familial—ending either in submission or the foreshadowing of vague but inexorable violence.

Naishtat’s preferred tool is intimation, favoring the potential over the kinetic. Early on, a police car is stopped by two teenagers who claim to have triggered the security alarm in their house. The point of view lingers excruciatingly in the street until the officer’s return; the sketch provides no immediate payoff but fans the palpable unease. The subjective camerawork, too, invokes a sinister vibe, especially when trailing volatile figures down corridors (calling to mind Gus Van Sant’s Elephant).

The character least willing to accept the oppressive norm is Camilo (Francisco Lumerman), a young man who treats the neighborhood as the focus of an ongoing exposé. He commandeers a dinner party with a game he calls “What do you want to be and own?” daring his companions to articulate what they want from life beyond their present lots. Though most abstain or equivocate, mouthing hollow words of contentment, his tactic fleetingly subverts their complacency—perhaps the most he can hope to accomplish.

Like last year’s Neighboring Sounds, another mixed-class account of a South American apartment complex responding to a security rise, History of Fear dramatizes the point at which desire for safety sublimates into paranoid acquiescence. Its discomfiting sound design (which eschews a music score) and mounting claustrophobia yield a counterpoint to Erlingsson’s thesis, embodied here by the animalistic fast-food patron: that open ranges draw out our affinity to beasts, but closed quarters make us indifferentiable from them.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Another study of subjugation, but one more willing to locate the menace, is Andrei Gruzsniczki’s Romanian drama Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Set in 1984, near the end of Ceausescu’s Communist regime, the film depicts a punitive order in which political dissent (and even apathy) is tantamount to professional suicide. Mathematician Sorin Parvu (Sorin Leoveanu), in his mid-thirties and sharing a flat with his mother, has long been denied access to needed texts and blocked from publication because of his refusal to pledge party support.

Elena (Ofelia Popii), the wife of Sorin’s best friend who has emigrated to France, waits month after month for clearance to join her husband. Scrounging forbidden foodstuffs, struggling to keep her declining father and spirited son out of trouble—the latter’s teacher is a one-woman iron curtain who claims she’s raised “hundreds of generations”—Elena recognizes the hopelessness of remaining in Bucharest. She even considers ferrying Sorin’s work to the free world, as Securitate agents wait to pounce on the man with the codename “Wanderer.”

Reportedly the first black-and-white Romanian feature in 25 years (therefore the first of the New Wave), Quod Erat Demonstrandum looks downright sumptuous next to its contemporaries from that nation. It unfolds as a historically rooted nail-biter with romantic undertones—Bucharest’s answer to The Lives of Others—with a graceful piano score and acts of true if understated heroism. Gruzsniczki opts not to demonize anyone on screen, not even the bureaucrats who incite treachery because they too felt the crushing weight of Ceausescu’s administration. He renders a climate of dread, but one (as informed by hindsight) where altruism and loyalty can triumph over coercion. You might not expect an uplifting aftertaste to come out of a Romanian meditation on its Communist past, but through Gruzsniczki’s elegant proof, quod erat demonstrandum.

While directors, cinematographers, and other manufacturers of the image hog the mystique, there are relatively few “name” editors. Thelma Schoonmaker is one exception who proves the rule. This is in part because of the unprecedented plaudits that Schoonmaker has received in her field, winning three Academy Awards, out of a total of seven nominations. This recognition has come through the single most vital artistic relationship of her career, with director Martin Scorsese. Their collaboration began in 1967 with Scorsese’s feature debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, became habitual with 1980’s Raging Bull, and has continued fruitfully through last year’s The Wolf of Wall Street.

On the occasion of the release of The Wolf of Wall Street on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD by Paramount, FILM COMMENT spoke briefly with Schoonmaker via phone about the nitty-gritty of cutting.

It seems to me that editing is one of the least understood aspects of filmmaking among us critics. We will say it is “sharp” or “good” or “crisp,” and leave it at that. What are the most common misapprehensions of your art?

There’s a great deal of mystery in film editing, and that’s because you’re not supposed to see a lot of it. You’re supposed to feel that a film has pace and rhythm and drama, but you’re not necessarily supposed to be worried about how that was accomplished. And because there is so little understanding of what really great editing is, a film that’s flashy, has a lot of quick cuts and explosions, gets particular attention. For example, with The Aviator, which I won an Oscar for—I’m sure that decision was based largely on the very elaborate plane crash that Howard Hughes had. That’s so dramatic, and you can really see the editing there, but for me, and for a lot of editors and directors, the more interesting editing is not so visible. It’s the decisions that go into building a character, a performance, for example, or how you rearrange scenes in a movie, if it’s not working properly, so that you can get a better dramatic build.

You’ve said that The Wolf of Wall Street is the most improv-heavy film that you and Scorsese have made in some time. What are the particular challenges of cutting improv?

Scorsese saw right away that this was a group of actors that were going to be wonderfully fertile at improvisation, so he instantly decided to open the film up to that, which meant that a scene that was two pages in the script became five minutes long or something. And so the original cut of the film was longer than was distributable—and “original” doesn’t mean that it was the right cut. So we had to shave down the improvisations very, very carefully, so as not to lose the power of them.

We had certain sequences that were beautifully designed by Scorsese: for example, the opening shots in the movie are all carefully planned, how each of them cuts to the other is carefully planned in his mind. He had plotted all of that out, to give a really big rush at the beginning of the film. And then suddenly you hit the wonderful scene in the restaurant where McConaughey is teaching DiCaprio about Wall Street, and you want to stay there because of the improvisation. The additions that everyone brought meant that the film swelled up, and that scene in particular swelled up. You suddenly come to a screeching halt here, then carry on again.

It was difficult for us to get a rhythm in this movie. Our other films perhaps have more momentum going forward. For people who love the film, they feel it moves very quickly. For people who don’t like it, it doesn’t. The improvisations were such fun to cut—it’s been a long time since we’ve done this amount of improvisation. I really love it, I’ve always loved it, because it’s like a big puzzle you’re handed: how the hell are you going to get it to hang together and seem like a dramatic scene?

The movie is full of conversational comedy scenes like that between McConaughey and DiCaprio. I’d like to talk about the scene at the diner between Jonah Hill and DiCaprio, where Hill’s character is first entranced by Belfort’s lifestyle. Now, I’ve seen the movie three times, and this was never evident in the viewing, but in closely watching this scene there are certain minor continuity gaffes—the tilt of DiCaprio’s head, the movement of the coffee cup. When you’re cutting a scene like this, how do you prioritize between performance and continuity?

The priority is absolutely on the best take for performance, and frankly I don’t understand why people get so hung up on these issues, because if you look at films throughout history, you will see enormous continuity errors everywhere, particularly when you’re talking about the Academy aspect ratio where you see more in the frame. Even in The Red Shoes, a film that nobody ever has complaints about, there are enormous continuity bumps, and it doesn’t matter. You know why? Because you’re being carried along by the power of the film. So throughout our history of improvisational cutting, we have decided to go with the performance, or in this case particularly with the humor of a line, as opposed to trying to make sure a coffee cup is in the right place.

I remember that when I was nominated for an Academy Award for GoodFellas and we lost to Dances with Wolves for editing, the editor of that movie said to me: “Why did you make that bad continuity cut?” And I said “Which cut? Which continuity error? We have tons of them.” He was talking about a scene with Paul Sorvino and another actor who was an amateur, but wonderful, though he didn’t know about matching. It was much more important for us to get this beautiful performance by this untrained actor than to worry about where the cigar is in Paul Sorvino’s hand. One wasn’t want to do that, one would hope not to do that, but if the choice comes between a beautiful, clean line and a laugh, we would always go for the laugh.

The original cut ran four hours. Can you talk about the developments that came in paring the movie down to three-quarters of that length?

It increased the pace at which the movie moved. In every improvisational scene there were maybe four or five lines I would’ve loved to have kept because they were so funny, but it meant that the scene was too long. The four-hour version was actually our first cut—it’s not a version that we would ever have considered distributing. The first people who saw it, who were some of the agents, loved it so much and thought it would work at that length. But Marty and I knew that was impossible to distribute, so we immediately started shaving it down. As we always do with our cuts, they’re always long at first, and you have to keep working to bring it down and get the right pace for the film.

So we lost some lines, but that’s better than losing whole scenes, which has happened with other films I’ve worked on—After Hours, for example. We lost five or six wonderful scenes, and finally I talked Marty into putting them on the After Hours DVD as extras. He doesn’t believe in doing director’s cuts because he, fortunately, has the power to fight until he gets the cut he feels he can live with and the studio can live with, and he does not believe in then creating another version. That was the only time he ever allowed me to put anything else on the DVD—not in the film itself, but as extras.

There are a lot of frisky, almost punch-line cuts in The Wolf of Wall Street, like when Hill’s character asks to see Belfort’s pay stub, and you cut on the click of the briefcase opening. The briefcase is all of a sudden in his lap, without Belfort’s reaching over and picking it up.

Well, the first cut we did, you saw him reach for the briefcase, open the briefcase—but who’s interested in that? That hard cut jumps the film forward, it keeps the energy up in the scene.

There’s another hard, shock cut during the scene of the attempted bribery on Jordan’s boat. Leo’s talking to Kyle Chandler’s FBI agent, and suddenly you cut to a wide shot and see that the other agent has sidled up behind him.

We didn’t expect that to happen. We didn’t expect Kyle Chandler to do that wonderful improv, the way he says: “Well, I think you just tried to bribe a federal agent…” DiCaprio’s reaction is so fantastic, with that false laugh, that “Ha,” and the wonderful way that Kyle delivers that “Little man…” That was strictly improv, and DiCaprio was really shocked by that, for someone of that power and ego to be called a “Little man”—it got a wonderful reaction from Leo. We do love to capitalize on those accidental things, you know. On the set Scorsese loves it when something accidental happens that enriches the film—he pounces on it.

That was a wonderful moment in the improvisation after the long, slow lead-up, where you’re not really sure what’s going on until Kyle says “I think you just tried to bribe a federal agent.” It’s one of Marty’s favorite scenes in the movie, and it was very brave to do such a long, slow build-up. I think a lot of directors would’ve said “Well, let’s just cut to the chase.” I was worried about it at first, frankly. I thought maybe it was too long, but it’s the build that achieves the power at the end.

As for the bit with the other FBI agent: Kyle looks over at him as an indication for him to come over and listen in, and we had footage of him crossing the boat. I was tempted to cut to that, as an editor I would’ve shown him coming over, but Marty said: “Oh, no, no, no, we should cut to the wide shot and he should just be standing there.” It’s a shock, and it’s a shock to the Jordan character too, and I think Marty was so right.

Back in 2009, Gareth Evans and a former cell-phone service technician, Iko Uwais, made a movie about silat, Indonesia’s martial art. It was called Merantau and served as a calling card for both star and director. The action was energetic, Uwais had charisma to burn, and the story was fun exploitation fare. But while shooting one of the action scenes in an elevator between Uwais and a silat teacher, Yayan Ruhian, Evans had the idea to bring Ruhian on board for his next movie as a co-star and action choreographer. The follow-up was supposed to be an epic gangster drama, but Evans couldn’t raise the funds and decided to shoot something more contained instead. It was the best thing that could have happened.

The Raid: Redemption told the story of a squad of cops trying to arrest a drug kingpin holed up in an apartment building populated entirely by criminals. Something of a moviemaking miracle, it was an example of the kind of narrative economy only the best movies manage. Now, Evans has gone back to his gangster movie, styling it as a sequel to The Raid called The Raid 2: Berandal. A hit on the film-festival circuit (it premiered at Sundance) and released by art-house distributor Sony Pictures Classics, it’s stylishly shot, edited with a lot of confidence in the audience’s ability to follow parallel action, and the action is faster and more brutal than anything else on the market.

The Raid 2 (which is opening here without the subtitle) picks up immediately after the ending of the previous movie with surviving cop, Rama (Uwais), contacting one of the few policemen not marinated in corruption, Bunawar, who is desperate to take down the two crime families that run Jakarta: Bangun’s clan, and the Japanese Goto family. Rama’s brother has recently been killed and so, eager for revenge, and worried about his family’s safety, he allows himself to be arrested in order to get close to Bangun’s hot-headed son, Uco, who’s serving out a prison sentence. He wins Uco’s confidence, and when he gets out (long after Uco), he’s a made man in Bangun’s gang. But Uco is chafing at the bit and has allied himself with outside gang leader, Bejo, who wants to turn Bangun and Goto on each other, then claim the city from the exhausted victor.

Most reviewers have focused on the action and they should, because it’s amazing. Evans, Uwais, and Ruhain spent months of pre-production choreographing the scenes, shooting them on video and editing them to see what they could pull off. Their action is shot wider, showing more of the actor’s feet and legs than normal, and the scenes can run from seven to almost 11 minutes. Most shots in an action movie show the actors executing two or three movements before cutting to the next shot, but performers in The Raid 2: Berandal exchange an average of four combinations in each shot, sometimes hitting 19 when the combatants are more skilled.

Evan’s great innovation in action filmmaking, however, is his mobile camerawork. In Hollywood, action scenes are shot using coverage, filming the action with long shots, then medium shots, then close-ups, sometimes using multiple cameras, and the editor assembles the scene in the editing room. Hong Kong invented segment shooting, in which each shot is filmed from one angle with one camera, designed for maximum impact, and then the next shot is built onto it; the fight grows organically without using master shots, and the result is a scene that’s practically edited in camera. Evans uses what appears to be a combination of these styles, but he keeps his camera mobile. His signature move is a handheld camera that circles around the fighters as they exchange blows, but he uses dolly shots, cranes, and camera operators passing the camera between moving vehicles to follow his characters through windows, down stairs, and over tables. 

But while there is an exhilarating rush to the technique and the physicality of the film, what’s it all about? For all the devoted sons, back-stabbing sons, treacherous fathers, incompetent fathers, and dutiful fathers, it’s hard to put your finger on what story this movie is telling, until you realize that it’s not really an action movie at all.

Some critics complained that The Raid: Redemption had too little story, but what it really had was an economy of storytelling. The movie had two emotional moments that drove the film. The first came late in the running time when cop Rama encounters a family member in the building. But what carried us through the movie till then was a very simple scene at the beginning. The movie opened with Rama portrayed as a nice, observant Muslim boy saying his prayers, nuzzling his pregnant wife, and getting ready to go to work. There was a gentle, shorthand sweetness to the scene that lingered through the rest of the movie, reminding us that Rama had a home and a family worth coming home to. 

In The Raid 2, Rama says he’s motivated by a desire to protect his family, but in a two-and-a-half hour movie, his wife gets about three minutes of screen time. In The Raid: Redemption, Rama is constantly trying to get home. In The Raid 2 when he gets out of prison he calls his family and discovers that his wife has been patiently waiting for him, apparently unfazed that he disappeared for two years. Afterwards, he mentions their safety twice in passing, but at no point are we led to believe they’re in immediate danger, and at no point does he try to visit them. In one scene, Rama slips his gang handlers in order to secretly trail Uco and film him at a meeting with Bejo. It’s telling that when he has an unobserved moment, he chooses to pursue his revenge and do his job, rather than seeing his wife or son.

In The Raid: Redemption the fights were emotionally varied: a fight to protect a wounded friend, a fight of mutual respect between two opponents, a fight between a traitor and the one he betrayed, a fight about trying to escape a room. In The Raid 2 there is one emotion motivating the fights: revenge. It’s a hard movie that needs to keep women, family, and softness off-screen at all costs.

Grim and humorless by necessity, the second the sloppiness of real life or an ounce of humor penetrate this movie it would all fall apart. It’s no coincidence that the few moments of levity occur only when women are onscreen. The mute assassin known as Hammer Girl is so ridiculously serious that she provides several laughs, and at one point a porn actress struts past the camera wearing a strap-on dildo and complaining about her fellow actor. There’s also a bar girl in a karaoke who manages to lip off with some welcome sarcasm. Otherwise, this is a movie where no one is allowed to crack a smile or wear bright colors.

There is no joy, no fun, no reveling in the physicality of the action. Most of the people fighting have no names, don’t know why they’re fighting, and proceed to dispense mayhem like efficient machines. The Raid 2 hints at more going on behind the scenes than expressionless, nameless people hurting each other, but we never get more than hints. They fight for anger or for money. The world of this film is the most cynical world imaginable—one that lives up to all our worst expectations. It’s a world where there is no kindness, no emotion beyond rage. It’s a paralyzed world of cynicism where women are absent, and men are unhinged violence dispensers, where everyone is corrupt, and everyone betrays everyone else. Everyone is a disappointment, angry, cruel.

There comes a moment in the middle of the movie in which one character chats with another while casually slitting the throats of several bound men who betrayed him. It’s followed by a series of parallel scenes showing some flamboyant hit-men dispensing with their targets. We have no idea why these people are being killed, and we have no idea of what the stakes are besides murder. That’s when it becomes clear that this is not an action movie—it’s a violence movie. The film’s aesthetic isn’t the aesthetic of action, it’s the aesthetic of horror.

The killers are nameless, they barely speak, they are unstoppable, and they generate massive quantities of gore with trademark weapons. Fights are full of lingering close-ups of faces being burnt, heads being blown open with shotguns, and Achilles tendons being severed. Men wear black leather gloves like giallo killers; rooms are lit in garish red like Hell; and enormous spooky warehouses, empty hallways, and abandoned rooms seem to make up the majority of Jakarta’s real estate. Action is no longer fun. It is hardcore.

This is where action filmmaking has been going for a while, and it’s a testament to the skills of Evans, Uwais, and Ruhian that they got there first. Before Bruce Lee, martial-arts movies were demonstrations of technique, but Lee ushered in an era where the emphasis wasn’t on an exchange of blows but on how quickly Lee could take down his opponent. It was all about power. Jackie Chan was a reaction to that, but for years we’ve been on a road taking us back to that era of brutal efficiency. Korea’s Man From Nowhere, Paul Greengrass’s Bourne movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Donnie Yen’s Sha Po Lang and Flashpoint, Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak films which have progressively jettisoned their humor until all that remains is two men beating the crap out of each other. Fighting is no longer a skill to be admired, it’s no longer something to be celebrated, it’s no longer joyous. Fighting is a job that needs to be done, as efficiently as possible. This is a movie about brutality and pain and endurance. It’s not a joyride, it’s a hell march. 

There are two action sequences that challenge this emotional hellscape. One is a car chase, expertly choreographed by Hong Kong’s Bruce Law, in which one character tries to save another, rather than one character trying to kill another. Shot with an eye for novel effects, it’s one of the movie’s highlights, probably because it stands in such stark contrast to the other action scenes. Then there’s the baffling, but definitely welcome, inclusion of Yayan Ruhian. Playing a kind of homeless killer named Prakoso, he assassinates a character we haven’t met yet, and has an awkward dinner with his ex-wife, before being dispensed with outside a nightclub. His character has no reason to be in the story except as another example of a father failing his family, but his few short scenes demonstrate greater emotional range than any other in the film. 

When Prakoso finally dies at the hand of a killer so brutal he doesn’t even get a name, the screen erupts into a sudden, one-night-only elegiac snowfall. There’s a history of sudden snowfalls in Japanese chanbara, often lending a tragic dignity to the death of a character. Here it’s as if the filmmakers are acknowledging that these characters can’t risk showing feelings beyond a stoic acceptance of pain. So the movie does it for them.

The Raid 2 is the middle of a projected trilogy, and middle films are usually the darkest (see: The Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). Middle films represent a branching point, allowing the third film to either go darker (as in the case of the Alien franchise) or lighter (as in the Indiana Jones movies). It would be hard to imagine a darker movie than The Raid 2, but it’s always possible, and Evans, Uwais, and Ruhain have a choice. Whether they choose to add Ewoks or kill Newt, it’ll be fascinating to watch.

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... After encountering unexplained opposition from the Hong Kong government for his television channel, Hong Kong TV, founder Ricky Wong was invited to sit down with the Communication Authority to work out their differences. Psych! The meeting ended even worse than it began, with Wong threatening legal action and the government taking an even harder stance against his channel.

... Actor Chapman To made a guest appearance at Ronald Ng’s concert last week. Also guesting was massive Cantopop star, Joey Yung, and To sang one of her songs and made a joke about how she had not won “Best Actress” for a film. Joey fired back over Twitter, and To wound up sending her multiple groveling apologies. Fully understandable since she’s rumored to be the former girlfriend of powerful Emperor Entertainment head honcho Albert Yeung, and since the last actor to make jokes about her wound up being beaten so badly by unidentified attackers that he wound up in the hospital.

...The next sport to burn up the silver screen? Badminton! Ekin Cheng, he of the immortal bangs, is on board to star in a Hong Kong movie, Full Smash, about that most ferocious sport of savage shuttlecock smashing.

... Thailand has a winner! For worst movie ever! Muay Jin Din Kong Lok (“Chinese-Looking Daughter Dances Till the End of the World”) opened on just 15 screens and took in a paltry US$1000. It’s become a cultural icon as the worst movie ever made in Thailand, and you only have to take a look at its trailer to feel the pain inside your heart.

... Until last week, only China Film Group had a license to import foreign movies into China, but now a second company has been given permission. China National Culture & Art Corporation just received this groundbreaking license, and there are rumors that as soon as it’s up and running, the quota for foreign films imported into China will be raised from its current level of 34.

... Eleven years ago today, Leslie Cheung, one of the biggest stars in Hong Kong, killed himself. As always, the tributes are pouring in.

... It was a boring night at the Asian Film Awards last Thursday for everyone except Wong Kar Wai as his film, The Grandmaster, won half the awards, setting a record. The movie took home Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Production Designer, Best Costume Designer, and Best Composer.

Wong Kar Wai and Zhang Ziyi used the wins as a platform to criticize Malaysia for its handling of the search for Flight 370. Ju Kun, a stuntman who worked on Wong’s The Grandmaster, was on the flight.

... Japan’s bad boy director, Sion Sono, just announced that his new movie would be a live-action adaptation of the racy manga, Shinjuku Swan, about a young man who works the streets to recruit girls to star in porn films and hostess bars. It will probably not win any Asian Film Awards.