In 2008, Charlotte Roche—a British-born, German-raised TV presenter—shocked Germany with a book about women’s bodies and dissident hygiene. Her novel Wetlands became a best-selling succès de scandale, its German title Feuchtgebiete roughly meaning “damp areas” and referring to its heroine’s nether regions, front and back. The narrator is 18-year-old Helen, whose lifestyle is a militant affront to traditional German ideals of cleanliness and female propriety. Joyously upfront about her sexual activity and erotic sovereignty over all her applicable orifices, Helen wages guerrilla war against society on the level of hygiene—her discourse a celebratory hymn to her holes and everything that comes out of them, or goes in, liquid and solid alike.

Roche’s profile as a spiky-but-unthreatening TV personality, together with the book’s emphasis on bodily emissions and the erotic and expressive primacy of the anus, made her at once a heroine and a figure of horror in Germany, and Wetlands a publishing sensation. However, English-language critics were skeptical about the book’s supposed radicalism, some of them pointing out that Roche’s taboo-breaking provocations were hardly new but only revisiting terrain already widely mapped in feminist writing and culture. And for that matter, feminist punk pioneers the Slits were cheerfully talking in interviews about knicker stains back in the early Eighties.

I haven’t read the novel, but the film adaptation by David Wnendt strikes me as being as close to The Slits’ shock-comedy aesthetic as to anything else (in this spirit, the end credits feature a song by later femme-punk practitioners Thee Headcoatees, “Cum Into My Mouth”). Wnendt’s film starts by quoting an angry reader’s letter to German right-wing tabloid Bild, complaining that Roche’s book “shouldn’t be read or adapted to film.” But however inflammatory and shocking Wetlands may have been to its original readers—there were reports of fainting at Roche’s live readings—I doubt that many people will either swoon or cross themselves in horror when they see the film. Audiences won’t be that shaken, and they may even not be that amused or stimulated; still, I doubt they’ll be too bored either.

The film begins with a cheeky extreme close-up of what looks like either cleavage or an ass. In fact, it turns out to be Helen’s bent knee as she skateboards down the street—a fooled-ya! shot that sets the tone for Jakub Bejnarowicz’s breezily playful camerawork. Helen (Carla Juri) confides in voiceover that she has always been prone to hemorrhoids and, plagued by her rebellious bowels, skates to a nearby toilet—one so grubby it makes the notorious stall in Trainspotting look Swiss by comparison—where she wades barefoot through murky, ankle-high cloacal fluids. That’s not all: in defiance of prissy caution, Helen makes a point of rubbing her crotch on toilet seats, the dirtier the better, proudly declaring that she’s never yet caught anything nasty that way. That’s when Wnendt unleashes his big SFX moment: a shot that swoops in on a stray public hair on an hyper-grubby enamel rim, then zooms down into the microscopic realm, into a digital fantasia of fanged, snapping microbes and curling tendrils—a Bosch-like jungle nightmare echoing the opening credits of Fight Club, with its similar theme-park ride through the human brain.

Yet the horror comes across as cheerfully innocent, even childlike. Wetlands is framed as a voiceover confessional, with angelic-looking Helen describing her fascination with her body and its emissions, and her commitment to making herself a “living pussy hygiene experiment.” She appreciates it when her “pussy mucus” smells of cottage cheese, relishes her sticky fingers after jerking off a boy (“My sex souvenir chewing gum”), and undertakes quasi-scientific masturbation experiments with vegetables in the bath (a little too whimsically, she’s shown not only writing notes while she does it, but sometimes wearing a swimming mask too).

Scripted by Wnendt and Claus Falkenberg, this episodic film gives us assorted scenes from Helen’s sexual career, including a languorous session with co-worker Kanell (Selam Tadese), who invites Helen over to shave various parts of her body; the most conventional softcore sequence in Wetlands, tinged with stereotypical eroticism (Kanell is apparently Arab), it wouldn’t be out of place in a film named Deutsche Emmanuelle. There’s also an episode in which, out of curiosity, Helen visits a brothel and goes down on one of the hookers—although this is a story she tells to arouse a potential lover, and as she notes, “I often mix up reality, lies, and dreams.” That, of course, is an easy out for the “anything goes” factor in this film, in which we’re never certain whether we’re on solid ground or in the area of pure fantasy.

What does seem reliable in Helen’s narrative is the matter of her rectal woes. Following an anal shaving misadventure (three words I never expected to use in a review), she ends up in a proctology ward, under the care of handsome young nurse Robin (Christoph Letkowski) to whom she takes a fancy. Helen decides that her hospitalization represents an opportunity to reunite her divorced parents, and fantasizes about them falling in love again by her bedside.

This is the most unsettling thing about Wetlands, and one that has troubled Roche’s critics. On one level, Helen appears to be the consummate liberated heroine, who as a result of her intelligence and experience has adopted a confrontational stance towards repressive norms. The film is most classically Punk Feminism 101 in those scenes where Helen helps enlighten her gauche friend Corinna (Marlen Krause), who becomes her menstrual blood sister when they trade tampons (of Helen’s own homemade design).

Yet the story keeps telling us that whatever’s going on with Helen, it’s because she’s been messed up by her parents. It’s one thing to give us flashbacks to the squeaky-clean, mentholated-blue childhood that she later rejects, quite another to suggest that her rebel spirit is dysfunctional, the product of emotional scarring. Her mother (Meret Becker) is an irredeemably repressed neurotic who has flirted with all conceivable religions and now settled on “the strangest of all,” as Helen calls it—Catholicism. Once the backstory emerges, revealing a traumatic crisis in the family’s history, it appears that Helen’s discontents and eccentricities can be laid at the doorstep of that classic horror figure, the hysterical mother.

As for Dad (Axel Milberg), he is initially presented as a sad middle-aged lothario, dating women of his daughter’s age. But as we, and Helen, get to know him (weirdly, she has reached 18 without any idea of what he does for a living), he emerges as an affable burgher, a little distant but essentially caring. He even brings Helen a hemorrhoid pillow in hospital: what greater parental love is there? The only point at which the parents together are truly depicted as nightmarish is during a dinner party at which they and the guests sample a turducken—that baroquely excessive mise en abyme of assorted poultry, which in a way reflects the film’s own story-within-story structure (and I’d guess that the bilingual Roche was thinking of wordplay on “turd”).

For all its studied raunchiness and underlying emotional grimness, Wetlands is irrepressibly breezy, both stylistically and in the way it presents its heroine—an anarchic freewheeling spirit who, while in hospital with an arse in critical condition, orders beer and pizza. Talk about incorrigible! Still, Wetlands gets away with its somewhat self-congratulatory tone by casting Swiss actress Carla Juri, whose golden ingénue looks and mischievous smiles at once have you believing in Helen and at the same time serve notice that Juri herself is relishing the whole thing as a knowing romp. That the actress is 12 years older than her character is never jarring, but comes across as another touch of cartoonish stylization. The tone of her voiceover can be coy, but Juri’s wide-eyed candor—she can be funny even while Helen’s in agony—let us in on the joke in a way that’s immensely appealing. I was trying to think who Juri reminded me of, and realized that it was Emily Lloyd, who played a rather more troublesome teenage rebel in 1987’s Wish You Were Here—one whose battle cry, appositely, was “Up yer bum!”

Not many recent films have so single-mindedly relied on disarming us with the charm of its lead actress, and the closest comparison that comes to mind is one about a French child-woman who, in her wide-eyed and eminently hygienic sexlessness, is virtually Helen’s polar opposite. Yes, you could call Wetlands the anal anti-Amélie, but—although Wnendt is nowhere near as stylistically pedantic—this film has a certain Jeunet-like flamboyance that you’ll either love or hate. There are freeze-frames with captions naming the characters, lurid lighting effects, plenty of abrasive music choices, the odd visual pun—like a daydream of Helen’s represented by a bubble literally bursting—and such visual exuberance as a shot that goes careering along with Helen as she skates bare-assed down a hospital corridor. It’s all efficiently breezy pop stuff—which is to say “fresh” in a rather Nineties way, a warmed-up derivative of Danny Boyle and Run Lola Run. And, as such, it contrives to be consistently entertaining and likeable.

Yes, likeable. As an object of scandal—the poster blurb, from Buzzfeed, dubs it “the most WTF, NSFW movie” at this year’s Sundance—Wetlands hardly represents serious competition to von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, say, or Catherine Breillat’s A Real Young Girl, which explored similarly sulfurous material back in 1976. Much of the scatology simply comes across as boisterous ribaldry (a very Teutonic symphony of rumbles and farts emerging from Helen’s gut), not that far from the routine content of today’s mainstream comedies, which never seem to be complete without at least one bowel catastrophe. The sterner stuff, while perhaps horrifying on the page and in the imagination, will simply have cinema audiences crinkling their noses and going “Ewww…”, no more than that. Take what’s ostensibly the film’s most outré scene: Helen pukes into a toilet bowl, only to find a large rat swimming in it. She picks up the rat (Eww!) and takes it home to tend it in a cage (Ahh!). Wnendt’s film domesticates its more troublesome themes in much the same way. 

Where are the women in Hong Kong movies? According to conventional wisdom, if you want to make a blockbuster these days, you need to get a Mainland actress and a Hong Kong actor. Hong Kong had its divas in the Eighties and Nineties (Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Michelle Yeoh) but today actresses from Mainland China wield all the superstar power. I love Sammi Cheng and Miriam Yeung, but they can’t come even close to the box-office clout of Gong Li (Miami Vice, Memoirs of a Geisha), Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Tang Wei (Lust, Caution, Blackhat), Zhou Xun (Cloud Atlas), Li Bingbing (Forbidden Kingdom, Resident Evil), and Fan Bingbing (Lost in Thailand, Iron Man 3). 

Echoes of the Rainbow

After actors, the next person on the attention-grabbing totem pole is the director, and that’s where Hong Kong women are doing even worse. Ann Hui is the only major female director in the industry. Sylvia Chang is a big deal, but since 1997 she’s only made five films to Hui’s 11. Clara Law was a major arthouse force in Hong Kong film, but her career has slowed down since her heyday in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The same could be said of Mabel Cheung, despite her success as a producer with Echoes of the Rainbow (10). Barbara Wong and Heiward Mak are sometimes talked about, but neither seems to be making a huge impact right now. It’s a strange situation, especially when one realizes that three of the most powerful figures in the history of Hong Kong film were women: Mona Fong, who ran Shaw Brothers with her husband Sir Run Run Shaw; Nansun Shi who founded and ran Film Workshop with her husband Tsui Hark (and who has a major career as a producer); and Selina Chow who ran CTV and gave jobs to a whole new generation of filmmakers, from Tsui Hark to Ann Hui, back in the Eighties.

You have to go outside the spotlight to find more women in Hong Kong film today, and specifically, you have to look back into the darkest, dustiest rooms where they’ve been working as writers. Because writers don’t occupy center stage, and because many Hong Kong writers don’t have their work translated into English, they’re easy to ignore. But female screenwriters and novelists have had a huge impact on Hong Kong film, and one of the first, and biggest, was Eileen Chang. Her most famous books and stories were written in Shanghai between 1941 and 1945, and dealt with women living in China after the Republican era but before the rise of Communism. She focused on the “uneventful” moments in people’s lives, and was later criticized for the lack of politics in her writing. That’s not to say that she was boring. As she wrote in a movie review in 1944, the biggest problem for women in China was “…how to live a fulfilling life of a virtuous woman in the face of a polygamous husband who made up the majority of Chinese men.” 

Long Live the Wife

She should know. As P.G. Wodehouse discovered, trying to stay neutral in an occupied country is impossible, and Chang’s three-year marriage to Hu Lancheng, a low-level Chinese official in the Japanese Occupation government, tarred her as a collaborator, even after he left her for his mistress. She tried to defend herself against this charge, but it was impossible to stop the hate. When writer Ke Ling, whom Chang had rescued from a Japanese prison, announced he was reprinting one of her wartime collections, he was viciously harassed. One critic denounced Chang as “a walking corpse from the Occupation period” accusing her of encouraging “the audience to continue indulging in their familiar xiao shimin [petty urbanite] world of stupor and misery.” In 1950 she realized she had no future in China and moved to Hong Kong. Then, in 1955 she moved to the United States and remained there for the rest of her life, denounced in Communist China as a pro-U.S. nationalist. She became something of a recluse, and when she died in Los Angeles in 1995, it took several days before anyone discovered her body. Yet interest in her writing experienced a renaissance in the late Sixties and Seventies, and, when she died, a final unpublished book found in her apartment sold out its 300,000-copy print run even before its official publication date. A second run of 100,000 had to be added just to have books available on the day of release.

Chang wrote Mandarin-language movies while she lived in Shanghai, and her screenplays for Love Without End (47) and Long Live the Wife (47) were big hits. She kept writing movies when she moved to Hong Kong, mostly for Cathay (then called MP&GI), but her lack of familiarity with Hong Kong culture was an impossible handicap for a woman who wrote comedies of manners. Other writers had to be brought in to fix the scripts of the great author, and directors found themselves having to work around the way she had staged scenes on the page. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone with nice things to say about her screenplays today, so it’s her novels and stories that have had a greater impact on Hong Kong cinema than her screenplays.

Love in a Fallen City

Ann Hui has adapted two of Chang’s works into films, Love in a Fallen City (84) and Eighteen Springs (97), the second of which was a serialized novel Chang wrote under a pseudonym after falling out of favor on the Mainland. Love in a Fallen City, one of 14 novellas she published in 1943, is about a divorced woman falling in love with a playboy on the eve of World War II (Chang later put on a stage version of the story). Stanley Kwan based his Red Rose, White Rose (94) on another of her short stories (and had to smuggle the film print out of China, resulting in his being banned from shooting in China for several years). Most famously, Ang Lee adapted one of her few stories dealing directly with politics, Lust, Caution (77), and turned it into the award-winning 2007 film starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai that got lead actress Tang Wei blacklisted in Mainland China. If ever a blacklisting could be considered ironic, it was that one. More than any of her main characters, critics believe that Wang Chia-chih, the character played by Tang Wei, was based on Chang’s own life, and the painful awakening of the naive Wang mirrored Chang’s own disillusionment (and ultimate exile from her beloved Shanghai) thanks to her first husband. 

Today, Chang has an exalted status in Hong Kong, even though her refusal to engage in politics (going so far as to not publicly declare her political leanings, which was practically required at the time), and her desire to write about domesticity and events that were, by her own account, “placid and static” landed her in trouble when she was first writing, misinterpreted as signs of political cowardice. But Chang’s not the only female novelist to inhabit an exalted spot in Hong Kong film. Her modern-day equivalent is Lilian Lee whose books provided the stories for Stanley Kwan’s Rouge (88), Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (93), Tsui Hark’s Green Snake (93), and Fruit Chan’s Dumplings (04). She also wrote the screenplays for Ching Siu-tung’s Terracotta Warrior (89), Clara Law’s Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (89), Eddie Fong’s Kawashima Yoshiko (90), and Andrew Kam’s Red and Black (91). Lee is as reclusive as Eileen Chang, preferring not to be photographed, and like Chang she also wrote her own screenplays, for Farewell My Concubine, Dumplings, and Green Snake among others. 

Green Snake

After these two novelists and scriptwriters comes a legion of female screenwriters, responsible for some of the most iconic Hong Kong movies. Besides Lilian Lee, numerous women have written for Tsui Hark, whether they come from his early team of writers known as B Boss (Elsa Tang, Once Upon a Time in China, Swordsman 2, Iron Monkey, as well as the non-Tsui Bride with White Hair), or whether they came on board later in his career like Sharon Hui who wrote The Lovers, Love in the Time of Twilight, and Once Upon a Time in China and America. Peter Chan’s UFO production company (and his later Applause Pictures) was a hotbed of female talent, like Jojo Hui who wrote He’s a Woman, She’s A Man among many others, the famous Ivy Ho (Comrades, Almost a Love Story) and Aubrey Lam (Age of Miracles, Golden Chicken 2, as well as Perhaps Love and Wu Xia for Chan’s Applause Pictures). Even macho movies, like those from Milkyway Image, home of Johnnie To’s tough-minded crime thrillers, include a woman on its writing team. Milkyway’s movies are usually written by a collective of writers who sometimes take a joint credit, one of whom is Au Kin-yee, responsible for movies all the way back to 2001, like PTU, Mad Detective, and Life Without Principle.

That’s not even mentioning screenwriter GC Goo-bi (Merry-Go-Round, Exodus), writer-director Sylvia Chang (Tempting Heart, Princess D), blockbuster writer Susan Chan (Big Bullet, Who Am I?, Tokyo Raiders, A Simple Life), and many more. Why do so many women write Hong Kong movies? The glass-half-empty way to look at it is that the screenwriter is the lowest person on a film, and even lower in Hong Kong where they are further devalued by the common practice of “flying paper” (new pages written on the set as a scene is about to be shot) and “lip rape” (where completely different dialogue is dubbed over actors in the editing room). But another way of looking at it is that women are under-represented in crew positions in every film industry, and the predominance of female screenwriters in Hong Kong is a fabulous anomaly. 

The Golden Era

Also, no matter how badly they’re treated in reality, writers are exalted as characters in Hong Kong films whereas directors and producers are often depicted as hacks. From Yim Ho’s Red Dust (90) to Wai Ka-fai’s Written By (09) writers are portrayed as tormented geniuses, whereas directors are shown to be opportunistic bottom feeders in too many films to mention, but start with Viva Erotica (96) or Vulgaria (12). The tradition continues right up until the present as director Ann Hui immortalizes another Chinese writer, Xiao Hong, onscreen in her newest film The Golden Era, which is set to close the Venice Film Festival before playing Toronto. Expect lots of torment, passion, and fevered bouts of inspiration as Xiao Hong clacks away at her typewriter like some kind of Mozart. It’s a reverence you don’t see when Ann Hui makes a movie about a movie producer, like A Simple Life, where the poor guy gets yelled at in meetings, eats dinner alone, and hangs around an old folks home. 

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Story of a Discharged Prisoner

… On September 1, around noon, director Patrick Lung Kong passed away. One of Hong Kong’s great directors, his 1967 movie, Story of a Discharged Prisoner, was remade by John Woo and Tsui Hark as A Better Tomorrow in 1986. A legendary actor and director, Lung Kong breathed new life into Cantonese films just when they needed it most. He often ran afoul of political forces who sought to block, ban, or censor his movies, and eventually he retired to New York City. A little over two weeks ago he received a lifetime achievement award and a tribute to his films at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Tsui Hark was on hand to present the award, and the house was packed with appreciative fans. I’ve written about Lung Kong before, but just wanted to take a moment to say that he was a true artist, and one of the kindest people it’s been my pleasure to meet. The world is a poorer place without him.

… Eric Khoo is shooting In the Room, probably the first mainstream sex film ever made in conservative Singapore. Set in one hotel room, following six couples starting in the 1940’s, the $1 million movie is produced by Film Workshop’s Nansun Shi.

… Lu Chuan, Mainland Chinese director of muscular movies like Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, shot in some of the harshest territory on the planet, and the epic WWII movie City of Life and Death, has teamed up with VFX house Prime Focus (Guardians of the Galaxy, Edge of Tomorrow, Gravity) to make his next movie: a massively-budgeted sci-fi action flick shot in Mainland China. Despite having always made large-scale movies before, Lu Chuan’s always fallen more towards the artsier end of the spectrum, but this time he promises full-blown mainstream action movie mayhem.

… Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) has confirmed that his next feature will be an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Victorian-set book Fingersmith, a revisionist 2002 take on the gothic novel. Park plans to set his version in Japanese-occupied Korea. The working title is A-Ga-Ci.

… You may not know who Mr. Van is, but he’s a big deal in Thailand. A legendary film pirate, Mr. Van sold and rented illegally copied VHS from his shop, mostly of movies that were impossible to find in Thailand, like the films of Wong Kar-wai and Takeshi Kitano. Film critics and directors were shaped by what he stocked on his shelves, and now Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (13) director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is raising funds to make a documentary about him called The Master.

… Mark Schilling has been writing about Japanese film for the Japan Times for 25 years. That’s slightly over one million words on Japanese movies. In his most recent column, he looks back on his career and the changes in the Japanese film industry since he started in 1989.

Scanners

“Why are you such a derelict, such a piece of human junk?” Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) demands of the bewildered man bound to the bed in his laboratory in David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981). It’s a rhetorical question: Ruth quickly explains to the piece of human junk in question, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), that he is a scanner. A telepathic “freak of nature,” Vale has been unwittingly recruited (by way of sedative-laced darts) to spearhead the fight against Darryl Revock (Michael Ironside), who is harnessing his own super brain for evil. With startlingly large blue eyes that lend themselves well to expressing both confusion and cognitive confrontation, Lack’s Vale helps drive the film’s willfully preposterous narrative to a blazing finish.

Stumbling onto Montreal’s underground film scene more or less by accident, Lack gained notoriety by playing versions of his smart-mouth self in Frank Vitale’s gritty coming-of age-drama, Montreal Main (74) and Allan Moyle’s vérité chronicle of hip, drug-addled Anglophones, Rubber Gun (77)—both of which crept past the 49th parallel to screen in New Directors / New Films in their respective years. Following his performance in Scanners, Lack was hailed by Laurence Kardish in FILM COMMENT (March/April 1980) as the potential savior of Canadian cinema: “Renaissance Outlaw,” the headline read.

Since starring in Cronenberg’s cult classic, the Montreal-bred personality has lived primarily under the radar pursuing a successful career as a painter in New York. If hard to keep up with, Mr. Lack is the kind of man next to whom you want to strategically seat yourself at a dinner party. Full of lewd stories punctuated by profound comments on art and politics, he can elucidate the advantages of “teal” vs. “cobalt teal” paint, discuss the significance of Edward Bernays, and recite lines from Pasolini’s Salò all within a 10-minute time span. This past summer, Criterion released a Blu-ray edition of the film, and FILM COMMENT caught up with Lack on a loading dock outside of his Chelsea studio for a chat.

Courtesy of the Stephen Lack Archive

In the FILM COMMENT interview, Laurence Kardish cites your acting as a much-needed reprieve from the “boors” typical of Canadian cinema—he mentions Meatballs and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz as examples—and talks about your potential star power as an actor. But in the end, you opted to leave acting for painting.

Being an actor speaking others’ words is a very difficult thing for me. I have a great fear of disembodiment, not knowing why I am doing something. To really do a role, I am guessing you have to lose yourself. The work I was known for in Montreal Main and Rubber Gun was about bringing myself to the screen as an underground personality. When doing Vale, we were going against type, and I did not have any hipster rapping to fall back on. This reductive elimination of my inner chatter was very disembodying. As a painter in a studio, alone, this disembodiment is somewhat eliminated and you can sing, dance, yell, or whisper or be silent as you translate the external to another plane.

I moved to New York propped up by the money from Scanners and Head On, and within a few weeks I was living in the East Village and painting in a small apartment I sublet from Jean-Michel Basquiat and his girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. The apartment was littered with Jean's work, and to clear it out I offered to buy some of his paintings, which I loved. He grew big and the East Village scene happened and I was part of it and showed all over the world. [Now] Jean is gone and I am still at it—surviving to date with a museum show coming up in October at the Fort Wayne Indiana Museum of Art, par exemple.

I am happy and grateful. Like Benjamin Pierce (Robert Silverman) says in Scanners: “Friends!? Yes, I have them. I don't want them, but I have them.” Of course, you could put any word in there for 'friends' and it would work. Try “scabies.” David at his most brilliant!

I didn’t realize Kardish was also Canadian.

I never [kept in touch] with him because I don’t do film. I have scripts, like everybody else in the world, but film is such a cooperative and collaborative process that has such a time delay between conception and execution that it’s hard for me to maintain interest. People like Cronenberg that make films are control freaks but even that isn’t enough control for me. I’d rather not do anything than have it escape and run free and be fed by strangers.

In Montreal, you never planned on being an actor, but rather fell into the underground scene. How did you end up on the big screen?

I was always a performer—undisciplined, but out there—since I was a kid. It was a compulsive thing: doing imitations and riffs to small groups of kids in classrooms and at recess. Today they would hit me with a thorazine dart from a helicopter and bag me off to a reserve for my behavior.  I was always getting in trouble for it. 

I met [Montreal Main director] Frank Vitale at McGill through friends I had made in the only “studio” course McGill offered at the time. We kept in touch, and when he was living with [Rubber Gun director] Allan Moyle on the Main our “crowds” intersected. Frank and Allen were writing one of those coming-of-age romance things, like typical post-college kids trying to get back to the dream of lost youth, cut into 90 minutes. I added a few twists to the story, which became the script for Montreal Main. Six months later I was setting up a painting studio and Frank asked me if I was doing anything today. That's how it all began: small video shoots in the off hours from other activities like painting and recreational spasms.

Montreal Main

So how did Cronenberg finally connect with you?

I got some good reviews [out of Rubber Gun] but they were all about calling me the next Lenny Bruce and that was a corner I was not ready to be martyred into. I guess that I was a bit more “punk” in my attitude. When Moyle was beginning to promote the film in Cannes, the publicity people tried to hang a tag on me saying: “Is he the new Lenny Bruce or Bob Dylan?” or something like that. And I changed it to read: “Is he the new Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, or Richard Speck of the Seventies?” Maybe that was the line that got David’s attention.

We met officially at Cannes and hit it off—although he is not exactly effusive—but we had a good introductory meeting and he invited me to join him in Monte Carlo the next day to watch the Grand Prix. Now that was something I could relate to.

I was in the middle of a shoot on another movie, Head On, when David sent me the script for Scanners and asked if I would do it. I liked David and thought he was special and I liked the way he could make me want to perform for him and to please him. So I said: “Yes, but you have to give me a week to rest from this mindset of Head On.” The director was in 10-hour turnaround for three weeks, which meant 14-hour work days. “Fair enough,” David replied. Of course, they lied. Within two days of wrapping Head On, I was in Montreal testing wardrobe and on set two days later.

There we were, the first day of Scanners and they had me get into this 18-wheel truck with four gearshift levers and have me drive into the shot. It was horrifying. I never drove such a thing and I was pretty disoriented. We were set up on a feeder road to the highway, and all the camera crew and staff were there, and some car on the highway slowed down to gawk—and a truck on the highway rammed them from behind. There was a death and sirens, and the whole crew jumped over the storm fence to help out. I was given a slight reprieve of an hour to figure out the gears. 

Compared to your performances in Rubber Gun and Montreal Main, which had a lot of rapid-fire, comedic dialogue, your performance in Scanners is decidedly deadpan.

My deadpan performance was deliberate. We scripted Montreal Main and Rubber Gun and then shot to make it look like it wasn’t scripted. Not only was Scanners not rehearsed, but it wasn’t written. David was coming in with pink, blue, and yellow pages for the day for the version of the script that we were doing, and he was working on it right there. As a result I had to deal with the dialogue in such a way that I was not reacting to things, because the information hadn’t been given to my character in the linear progression of the story. If you chop it up and look at it, 50 percent of my dialogue is not an assertion of anything but rather a question: “You called me a Scanner, what does that mean?” “You’re part of an organization, who are you?” Everything is a freaking question!

I would say to David on the set: “How are we playing this, Alice in Wonderland?” [Valley Girl accent] “Hi, you’re a caterpillar, but you’ve got a Hookah, like, why? And what are you smoking? What does that mean? You’re a butterfly?” Because there was no rehearsal time to develop the character of Vale, we decided to “neutralize” any extremes, and that way things could be readjusted in post without having to compromise because of an inappropriate nuance.  

Dick Smith and Stephen Lack, courtesy of the Stephen Lack Archive 

Judging by the interviews on the Blu-Ray, Ironside seems like a pretty serious guy with a completely opposite approach to the material—much more studied. How did you gel on set with the other actors? In the Kardish interview you talk about bonding with McGoohan by reciting Yeats.

Yes, McGoohan and I bonded. We were reading lines and we did "The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and he was impressed that I was literate enough to know—and love—that poem. But his personal claim to fame, or pride rather, was that he was doing Shakespeare at the beginning of his career and something happened with the lead actor and he had to learn the role of Hamlet overnight. And he did! He memorized and worked out Hamlet overnight—this is a man of vast intellectual capacities and great heart.

Ironside wants to prove that he’s as good as whoever he’s trying to be as good as. And that’s exciting for Michael and the audience. He does a good villain, though I don’t feel that a good villain necessarily has to scowl. We played brothers who didn’t know we were brothers and one was being manipulated by the other brother. It was a very complicated relationship and I was the innocent in it. I took it at face value that [Michael] wanted a good end product; he wanted to put as much of himself into it as he could and he did a great job.

I learned from the Criterion Blu-ray of Scanners that the infamous exploding head was achieved with a shotgun. Did you get to witness the big moment?

Yes, I did, and it was a wonderful moment. It was orchestrated by my friend Gary Zeller, who just passed away. I saw him get under the desk with the shotgun.

Did you get hit with the gunk?

Did I get hit with a little bit of muck? A little bit, yeah! Everybody was under the plastic, but I’m too claustrophobic to be under the plastic, so I got hit. But I’ve been getting yelled at for bringing mud in since I could leave the house. [Laughs]

Did you expect the film to achieve the cult status that it has? And has the DVD release—or hindsight in general—shifted your perspective on the project’s significance?

The film itself was groundbreaking, but I never realized it at the time. I had faith in David. I sensed his intelligence and I know from myself that the good stuff takes a while to understand. The film is very layered—as are most of David’s movies—even though it was written under extreme pressure. I remember being at rushes and not really getting what I was seeing. It all seemed so blank, the sets were sparse, and everything seemed to be white in the background. Everyone else watching was thrilled with the footage. I said: “It looks kinda blank to me,” and someone replied: “That's David’s style,” to which I answered—like the bitch I can be sometimes—“Style? It looks like a fuckin’ dentist’s office!” Of course, I was later to grow to appreciate such backgrounds and even the occasional nurse’s uniform. That's progress.

The music and the entire way sound is treated on the film were groundbreaking as well. Most people concentrate on the special effects. The gore David brought to the table is something everyone deserves and wants a bite of. Thanks [should go] to Dick Smith and Gary Zeller among others who made that possible, and a special shout-out to the artist Mark Prent whose sculptures inspired David, I am sure. With time I see how much influence his work has had on other filmmakers, from the X-Files to J.J. Abrams. I visited J.J. in L.A. and he told me that when Cronenberg visited there, all the staff practically lined up to meet him.

If my sources are correct, you still have the head from movie.

Yeah, I have the head where my eyes exploded and the chicken livers exploded through my eyes that was made by Dick Smith, who just passed away. He was a great guy. Nervous. He was 92. I can’t believe he lived that long dealing with all those chemicals he had to deal with to make the things that he was making. But he was brilliant! And he came from a time when things were done physically, not digitally, and he had the budget for experimentation, and the drive and the nervousness to get it done within the confines of the schedule of making the film.

I went to a horror convention with my head, twice. The entire convention space was filled with booths of people that had expanded on Dick Smith’s original discoveries. It was fantastic! People like to pose with [the head]. If it were the Seventies, people would be exposing their genitals to it. But those days are long gone—people don’t think that way anymore.

"A Tribute to Spring," courtesy of the Stephen Lack Archive

What was it like working with all those exploding bladders attached to your body, especially in that final “scan off” scene? The way the special effects guys talk about it on the Blu-ray make it sound pretty grueling.

Yeah, and that was an aberration of my contract. I knew about the kind of effects Dick Smith did because of The Exorcist, which he was also a part of. I didn’t want anything to be done to my eyes. But Dick, who was a master manipulator, said: “Oh, we’re just going to cast you with your eyes open . . . This way it will look more realistic.” We didn’t get along that day. But he was grateful enough to give me the head and thank me for saving part of the film because I solved a problem [with a leak].

Getting my head cast, as a claustrophobe, was not fun. With my eyes open, frozen with Novocaine and plastic cups over my eyeballs! That was the first time that was ever done. They made me force my eyes to stay in the open position and not blink for the 10 minutes it took for the cast to harden.

Sounds like a horror film in and of itself.

Well, it was a horror film for Dick Smith listening to me because my mouth wasn’t covered. It was revenge by expletive. And he did not know that I was an artist and that absolutely nothing was to happen to my eyes.

How do you feel now about the title “Renaissance Outlaw” that Kardish gave you?

Maybe I was. But we all are outlaws, otherwise the Churches would be out of business. By virtue of being alive we are propelled as humans to transgress a bit and that way we discover who we are and who we do not want to be.

Scanners is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

Standing at the front of a jewel-box theater in Telluride over the weekend, Alexander Payne called a 12-minute movie about a cat on the run “one of the first examples of pure cinema that I know.” He was gushing about The Perils of Priscilla, a 1969 short by Carroll Ballard that Payne said he has watched some 30 to 40 times—more than any other movie.

The Perils of Priscilla screened in a program of nearly lost and now restored short films by Ballard that were a highlight of the 41st Telluride Film Festival. The evening, bookended by speeches from both Ballard (now 76 years old) and Payne, was anchored by Seems Like Only Yesterday, a short 1971 nonfiction essay that preserves the insights of a dozen Los Angeles centenarians. Wary about the future and recalling life in the city before sidewalks and telephones, the aged American’s remarks are paired with aerial shots of urban sprawl, imagery from contemporary TV commercials, and views of city streets packed with billboards and strip malls. Ballard said he sought to capture the dramatic changes experienced during the lifetimes of his elderly subjects. Funded by a grant but never aired because public television executives feared rights issues stemming from Ballard’s use of real TV advertisements, the 45-minute film was shelved and screened just once at the Pacific Film Archive back in 1981 before its single Telluride screening.

“To me the meaning of the movie was impossible without [showing] the media,” Ballard explained as he defended his use of the TV clips. “The media was what was driving things in those days.”

While Ballard’s forgotten films were showing to a few dozen people on Saturday night, a few blocks away hundreds of Telluride attendees packed the well-appointed Werner Herzog Theater, a temporary venue built on top of an ice skating rink at the center of the large town park.

At Telluride, movies start as a whisper, as festival co-director Julie Huntsinger observed on the first day. “They may become a shout elsewhere,” she added, referring to the looming Toronto International Film Festival, where this year organizers took measures to limit the number of high-profile movies that would debut prior to Telluride and Venice.

Even so, Telluride audiences got an end-of-summer look at some studio films that will be unveiled in theaters this fall, including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman and John Stewart’s Rosewater, to Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild and Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game.

Birdman

Birdman, a darkly comedic look at the life of an aging actor, led the weekend as the best of the new narrative movies on offer at Telluride. Michael Keaton’s often unhinged performance as a self-centered former action film star trying to stage a Raymond Carver story is matched by Emmanuel Lubezki’s constantly mobile camerawork, which is stitched together to create the illusion that the film is playing out in one continuous take.  

All weekend, Telluride attendees—a mix of tourists, cinephiles, retirees, Hollywood insiders, and awards-season bloggers—seemed to be buzzing about Birdman. Additional screenings were added to accommodate interest in the movie.  

“What have you seen?” is the standard greeting among strangers in the small, well-heeled Colorado mountain town. Passholders waiting outside anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes use this pickup line to spark a conversation and get crucial tips. Although such exchanges are common at most festivals, because Telluride’s organizers unveil the lineup on the eve of the event and often announce screening times on the fly, attendees are constantly looking for guidance from each other.

Instead of big films getting all of the attention this year, an animated short about a singing volcano and an array of new documentaries were among the other highlights at this idyllic movie marathon.

Ethan Hawke’s documentary about a reclusive pianist, Seymour, and Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Reaper, about serial killings in an underprivileged area of Los Angeles that were ignored for decades, were two Telluride titles that earned well-deserved attention ahead of Toronto, where they will compete for attention with star-driven offerings among the nearly 200 new films screening at that fest.

Yet it was Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence that seemed to stoke the most intense discussions in the wake of its screenings in Telluride, just as its predecessor, The Act of Killing, did at the festival two years ago.

The Look of Silence

While The Act of Killing revealed the dark hearts of killers, this companion film hones in on a family who are grappling with the murder of a sibling by an oppressive regime in a country that has yet to acknowledge its genocide. Adi Rukun, a soft-spoken optometrist, confronts criminals with a quiet confidence that is disarming due to his measured but assertive manner.

Over the weekend, Oppenheimer emphasized that he hopes to foster reconciliation in Indonesia and predicted that his film will have a big impact in the country once it is screened and made available to a local audience. But Rukun and his family are in such danger as a result of participating in the film that they have moved to a different area of the country, far away from those who killed their loved one.

“I dream of an Indonesia where we can live without fear,” Rukun said over the weekend in remarks translated by the filmmaker as the two sat on stage next to Werner Herzog, an executive producer on both of Oppenheimer’s films. Rukun seemed ill at ease in front of the adoring Telluride crowd, staring down at his lap as Oppenheimer and Herzog spoke in English. He only raised his head when asked a direct question.

“I am happy to have this opportunity to represent survivors in general,” he said, adding that he hopes this film will pressure elected officials in Indonesia and the United States to acknowledge the genocide and facilitate an era of healing and truth about nearly 50-year legacy of pain and murder.

Until his country accepts its history, he concluded, “People cannot mourn, and the dead cannot be released.”

An unexpected Telluride breakthrough offered a respite from films that took on weighty topics, yet it was no less moving. Lava, a seven-minute musical short from Pixar, won over audiences at multiple weekend screenings. Even after seeing it multiple times, I found its charms impossible to resist. On the final day of the festival it was added to a free outdoor program of films in Elks Park at the center of town.

The origins of the short lie in an impulsive purchase. Director James Ford Murphy, the head of animation at Pixar, bought a ukulele while in Hawaii on his honeymoon two decades ago. Moved by the distinctive local music played on the little wooden instrument there, he sought to create verses he could set to that sound.

The endearing story of a lonely, yearning volcano named Uku who sings of his hope to find “someone to lava,” the short’s island landscapes were inspired by the state’s sweeping geographic wonders. During a presentation in Telluride, Murphy shared early sketches and helicopter footage set to the rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” performed by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

“What if I could write a song that makes me feel the way that song does and feature it in a Pixar film?” James Ford Murphy remembered thinking, as he detailed his own ambitions for the short, which will debut in theaters next summer with a new Pixar feature.

When pitching the project at the animation studio a few years ago, Murphy picked up his little ukulele and sang the song for Pixar chief John Lasseter—just as he did on the final night of this year’s Telluride festival, outside on a chilly evening before the final film program of the weekend.

His advice to the audience was short and sweet, just like his new film.

“You can’t be afraid to make a fool out of yourself,” he said.

If you’re like me, and I know I am, one of your great pleasures is visiting Observations on film art, the blog maintained by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-authors of standard textbooks Film Art and Film History. Bordwell, who introduces the entries that he’s written with the jaunty salutation “DB here,” recently stirred up a bit of controversy with a piece called “Zip, zero, Zeitgeist.”

The jumping off point of the piece, as with quite a few of the Observations on film art posts, is a lump of entertainment journalism which cavalierly tosses out a broad assertion without any detectable undergirding of research or fact. As Bordwell and Thompson put it in the Preface to their Minding Movies, a collection of essays which originated on the blog, “One of our strategies is debunking, zeroing in on conventional wisdom that journalists, facing blank pages and looming deadlines, persistently fall back on.”

In this case, the offending item is the inaugural edition of a New York Times Opinion Pages column in which Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat, going back and forth on “movies, pop culture, television, and other real-world distractions,” co-star as “The Moviegoers.” I would say the worthlessness of such an enterprise is evident outright, not least because it uses the suddenly-eerily-ubiquitous conversation format, beloved of drips who don’t have force of personality enough to occupy the “stage” of the essay format by themselves, and so turn instead to an approximation of pithy banter. Bordwell, who has more patience than I, seems to have actually finished the thing. A nonpareil close-reader, his standard siege tactic is to detect the slightest infelicity of language, use it as an entry point to dig into the offending piece like a sapper, compromise the structural integrity of the entire edifice, and bring it crashing down. In this particular case, he makes hay with the word “distractions” before proceeding to his main point. Beginning from Douthat’s statement that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes provides “allegory” and “metaphor” for current headlines, Bordwell opens up a full-scale offensive against “the suggestion that movies can bear traces of the national psyche, or reflect national debates we’re having right now, or provide inadvertent ‘allegories’ of contemporary history.”

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

This suggestion Bordwell dubs “reflectionism,” which he deems “the last refuge of journalists writing to deadline.” His voiced opposition to reflectionism is hardly new, if it has never been expatiated quite so. It appears in a 2008 blog posting called “Superheroes for sale,” for example, which I happened to cite in a footnote to my column of 8/15. In a 2011 article for Film Comment called “Academics vs. Critics,” Bordwell describes the “cool, even adversarial” relationship between journalistic criticism and academic study—in his view, unusual to the film world—while conceding that “both traditions often assume that a film can reflect the moods or anxieties of the society it comes from,” an idea that “usually leads to rather vague and vacuous explanations.” Against this recourse to vaporous theory, Bordwell advocates the hard facts of “middle-level research.” He is less tough on the critical profession as a whole in this piece than in “Zip, zero, Zeitgeist,” even providing a positive example of “cinephile criticism in rhapsodic mode”—here, Kent Jones on Hou Hsiao-Hsien. This is a flattering representative of the trade, to be sure, though it smacks of “some of my best friends are film critics,” and I don’t think Jones, though he certainly has his deadlines to contend with, would count himself among the ranks of workaday journalistic toilers. In a 2003 interview with Senses of Cinema, asked if he could envision “writing for a weekly or daily,” Jones responds thusly:

“I wouldn’t even begin to know how to do what Manohla [Dargis] does. It’s a grind, but she’s excellent at it. Vincent Canby was excellent at it. Jim [Hoberman] is a great critic on a weekly basis. If you’re doing what Canby did, you can make an ongoing history out of it. Jim does that in a different way. Armond [White], in his own odd way, does it. It’s true that being editor at large and writing about what I feel like, rather than having to see movies like Swimfan (John Polson, 2002), can become a danger.”

Like Bordwell and Thompson, Jones’ position—hard-won and well-deserved, to be sure—allows him to practice a “criticism of enthusiasm,” to use a phrase that Bordwell borrows from “the Cahiers crew.” The “danger” that Jones refers to is that of being out of touch with “what people are reacting to and where their opinions are coming from.” In the Preface of Minding Movies, Bordwell and Thompson emphasize quite another vocational hazard: “Reviewers must say something about many current releases, and this dull compulsion can be a death march of the intellect.”

It can be, certainly. But as someone who spent five years writing about film for a weekly, and who is never entirely free of the specter of looming deadline—even this little corner of the Internet, in which I hope that I can usually be found practicing a criticism of enthusiasms, must be filled once a week, or my editors will look at me askance—I feel a word should be said for compulsory opinion, and the spur of the due date. Firstly, I know of no available data which compares instances of intellectual death among, say, daily or weekly film reviewers to individuals working in the serene/somnolescent atmosphere of the university or the nonprofit arts sector over a comparable period. (If I could find an appropriate pie chart to counter Bordwell’s with, I surely would.) Moreover, I have my own quibbles with Bordwell’s language. We always hear the same words applied to the reviewer beat—a “grind” that “dulls”—though I’m not sure why the grind should necessarily be imagined as a mortar and pestle that reduces gray matter to paste rather than, say, a whetstone that keeps one sharp. If anything, the demands of a beat can keep the critic from becoming complacent in the knowledge of their own taste—to make a living at the movie chat game, a kind of mandatory curiosity is required. I find the critics that I enjoy are those who forestall ever-threatening complacency through continually challenging their idea of what the medium should be against the always-in-flux reality of what it actually is.

But let us return to this dulling grind. What causes it? It can’t just be the result of watching so very many movies, for anyone in the film culture business, from the programmer to the researching academic, must put in this toil as well. In his “Academics vs. Critics,” Bordwell offers some suggestion of where the crucial difference must lie: “good historical research often involves postponing aesthetic judgment. You may not find films from before 1920 admirable (though you should!), but in any event this body of work and its contexts cry out for intensive study.” So, even if the existing product of, say, 1914 that an academic might be compelled to dig through for purposes of research is not of greater aesthetic interest on the whole than that of 2014, which a critic is compelled to turn out for in the course of going about their beat, the academic is spared the wear-and-tear of forming all of those judgments.

The Name of the Game is Kill!

This is the position stated by Renata Adler, who replaced the outgoing Bosley Crowther as the head film critic of the New York Times for a stint in 1968-69. “Who wants to hear somebody’s opinion every other day?” Adler is quoted as saying with regards to this position in a 2013 profile in The Guardian. “Everybody has opinions about films anyway, so who wants to hear the shrew that is oneself? To do this for years and years?” The boredom, I am sorry to say, is very evident in many of the pieces filed by Adler, in every respect a greater prose stylist than her replacement, Canby. It’s hard to imagine responding to a film like Carlo Lizzani’s Bandits in Milan, teeming with action and ideas, with something as lackluster as this. An Internet acquaintance recently apprised me of an Adler piece filed June 6, 1968 in which the future Speedboat author was presumably assigned to cover a double-feature of “gory, Italian-made Western” Shatterhand and horror film The Name of the Game is Kill! She concludes her first paragraph: “Both films are designed for exactly the audiences their titles would attract. There is nothing good in them.” (Unclear as to if this “them” describes the films, audiences, or both.) The second paragraph is devoted to describing the décor of the Loew’s Delancey, where the movies are playing.

Given that opinion-mongering is such a joyless gig, it’s hard to see why the poor souls strapped to its Wheel of Pain are subject to such resentment—see, for example, Adler’s 1980 essay “The Perils of Pauline,” a sentence-by-sentence dismantling of La Kael in The New York Review of Books—rather than pity. Chris Fujiwara, a former beat critic who, as of the 2010 publication of a piece in n + 1 called “To Have Done with Contemporary Cinema,” had withdrawn to an ivory tower position, gives a clue to where this resentment may originate. “Journalists have lots of advantages,” Fujiwara writes. “They get free stuff and invitations. Many people respect them even though they despise them. But the most important perk of all is that the journalist is free from a worry that haunts the rest of us: whether or not we are contemporary.”

Bordwell would appear to be at least partially immune to the insecurity that Fujiwara describes. As of 2011, he and Thompson’s blog had had “over a million total visitors after three years,” while “each year brings… about 80,000 returning visitors”—numbers only a handful of “name” critics could hope to better. Better still, his income and job security is in no way contingent on the vicissitudes of the cultural journalism game. He is beholden to no editor. He has the freedom to say as he wishes, and a platform from which to say it. In “Zip, zero, Zeitgeist,” what he wants to say has to do with skewering a number of much-circulated pieces of accepted wisdom, including the assertion that the filmgoing audience is a representative sample of the populace as a whole (“one-third of Americans over the age of two never go to the movies, and another ten percent go once a year”), that there is a massive shift in the national psyche every time there is a new tenant in the White House, and that it is within the power of blockbuster movies, often projects that are years or decades in the making, to predict the “current” mood of the country when they finally happen to make it to the screen.

Let's Be Cops

As it happens, I don’t need to strain myself too much to find a rejoinder to Bordwell, because Grantland’s Wesley Morris has already done the work. Reviewing the purported impersonating-an-officer comedy Let’s Be Cops, which was rather less-than-serendipitously released the week after the shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer, Morris begins: “All movies choose their moment. It’s called a release date. Some moments, however, choose their movies. And it looks as if the moment has chosen Let’s Be Cops.” In the piece that follows, very little attention is paid to the aspects of filmmaking which Bordwell suggests are fair game for critics: Plotting, “point-of-view and exposition,” generating “sympathy or antipathy,” “character conflicts both external and internal,” and the burning question, “Does it accord with the sharply contoured plot architecture characteristic of U.S. studio filmmaking?” I would argue that, nevertheless, Mr. Morris is serving us very well indeed as a critic here by dwelling on what Bordwell calls, in passing, the “unintended consequences” of filmmaking.

While I concur with Bordwell’s championing of “active creation” over “passive reflection,” and his assertion that “Movies are worth studying for themselves,” I am not sure that we would be able to come to an agreement on where exactly a movie begins and ends. When writing about Paul Schrader’s The Canyons last year, for example, I argued that the transparency of the film’s production, and the media furor surrounding it, went “beyond merely ‘doing press,’ to the point where The Canyons’ interactivity has become an extension of the text, a conceptualist outgrowth of the movie. To block out the hype and focus solely on the sacred film itself, as critics indignant at all of this ballyhoo would have us do, is to supremely miss the point.” Of course the elements of a film that Bordwell deems permissible as evidence when discussing its qualities are always of paramount importance—I suspect that a disturbing number of working critics don’t even have a functional knowledge of lens lengths—but it cannot be forgotten that a film belongs to its moment, to borrow Mr. Morris’s phrase, as well as to its creators, and if what that means cannot be quantified so definitively as average shot length, it is worth pursuing this question up to but not over the brink of feigned omnipotent visions into the mass-mind of the spectator-polis.

I have met Bordwell only once, when he was in New York to present a lecture on Kenji Mizoguchi at Queens’s Museum of the Moving Image, on the occasion of a complete retrospective of all of the director’s surviving films. (The essentials of this talk may be found in an Observations on Film Art entry called “Mizoguchi: Secrets of the Exquisite Image.”) Recalling his merry demeanor, I for a moment am willing to believe that there is something to all that talk about the journalistic grind, for I have rarely met a movie-lover whose pleasure in the subject of his study seemed so undiminished and altogether nourishing. After the lecture, conversation ran to the curious compulsion to rank the Big Three Japanese directors, which had been begun anew with the retro, the need to say Mizoguchi and Ozu instead of Kurosawa, for example, rather than just Mizoguchi and Ozu and Kurosawa. I remember particularly a moment when Bordwell spoke of Mizoguchi’s late, somewhat uncharacteristic color films Tales of Taira Clan and Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (both 1955). He began to say something to the effect that these were the only two Mizoguchi films that he didn’t like, before correcting himself: “I should say they’re the only two I haven’t learned to appreciate.” This reflects a humble and inquisitive attitude that many of us critics could learn something from. I wish that he would extend a little of the same goodwill to approaches that are not his own, rather than slandering the entire output of the beleaguered critical-grind school.

Perhaps as a side effect of being forced to watch Battleship Potemkin multiple times in film school, many contemporary critics use “formalist” as a pejorative. However, the films of Eugène Green adhere to the rigorous conventions of the Baroque theater and succeed in parsing philosophical issues with a winning wry sense of humor. His latest, La Sapienza, is a rich work that approaches the experience of aging through two sets of couples: French middle-aged married professionals who have lost their passion for work and each other in the face of the modern world; and an adolescent Italian-Swiss brother and sister. Meeting by chance in a park in Switzerland, the couples pair off by gender. Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) reluctantly takes his younger counterpart Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) under his wing, repeating a tour of Italian architecture he undertook as a student, and their relationship slowly comes to mirror that of Baroque architect Francesco Borromini and his younger assistants. At the same time Alexandre’s wife, Aliénor (Christelle Prot), and Goffredo’s sister, Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), establish a thoroughly nurturing and warm rapport.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke to Green after La Sapienza’s premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.

How do you go about composing a frame? Do you begin with an image or do you begin with an idea?

Actually, all of my frames are composed, at least basically, when I write the script. If there’s a dialogue, it’s more that I have my own convention for making something strong come out of the actor when he’s speaking. At the beginning, since it’s less intense, I film in a more or less normal way: that is, the camera is behind one of the speakers so that you see his shoulder or part of his head, what in French is called en amorce, and then you see the other character looking at the person he’s talking to. But when it becomes more intense, I start putting the camera between the two characters, so that the spectator receives fully what someone [in the conversation] would receive. I think about the progression so that usually the intensity increases, the frame becomes more and more close-up. The waist, then chest, then bust [i.e., head and shoulders], and then just part of the face. And then if it’s a very long conversation, as in The Portuguese Nun [09], where there’s a 20-minute conversation, I go farther away and then closer again. So these are very simple things, but that’s what I like. Simple things are, for me, strongest.

I also like to try and capture the energy that comes from absence, or from absence after presence. So, for example if a character is going to enter the frame, I usually start with an empty frame and, for example a foot shot, a foot frame—I do a lot of foot frames. I often start on the ground and then the feet enter, so the spectator feels the distinction between the empty space where there’s no presence and the physical presence. And then sometimes if a character goes out of the frame, I still keep the camera there because I want the spectator to feel the transformation of the inert matter, where there is still the personal energy of who was there, who is no longer visible but who remains present by his energy, and by his absence.

Why did you choose this particular Baroque rivalry and pair it with this contemporary story of these older people being revitalized and finding meaning through mentorship?

Because Borromini for me represents the true artist—that is, an artist who believes in his art and whose first concern is not to succeed socially but to go through what he thinks is the necessary path towards his art. When people think about the history of architecture and Romans in the 17th century, it’s always the rivalry between Borromini and Bernini. And for me it represents two points of view in relationship to art. It’s something very vital and with a great deal of meaning today, because a great deal of what is produced today as art is actually just a means of getting wealth and social position, but there’s no real artistic engagement. Often the most interesting artists are not the most visible in the social sphere.

There’s also a spiritual conflict. In France the conflict is very important in the 17th century, between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. And for me, the French have an ideology which came from the 18th and 19th century, and which is taught in school as distinct about France from all other countries—France being classical and not having gone through “Baroque is a sin.” They always oppose what they call French classicism—the word didn’t exist in the 17th century, and even less the concept—to Roman baroque. But actually, in the context of French culture—as in the way that I define Baroque culture—the culture around Port-Royal, the center of Jansenism, was actually the most Baroque culture in France. I make a parallel between that opposition and the opposition between Borromini and Bernini.

Bernini worked mainly for the Jesuits and his spiritual director was Gian Paolo Oliva, who was the Supreme General of the Jesuits. Borromini was very pious but it was a private sort of piety. In the Roman context, his work resembles what the Jansenists value in French [architecture] because it’s very pure, it’s all just white. For example, in the Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza [a church Borromini designed], it’s just white forms, but the energy comes from the conflict between the forms and not from just superficial decoration, which is mainly what Bernini [used], at least in his decorative style. Sant’Andrea al Quirinale is also purified but it’s very academic actually, it follows rules, and...voila. Have I answered your question? [Laughs]

And why did you pair this story with the story of the architect and his wife?

Because what he goes towards is la sapienza—sapience in French—that is, knowledge which leads to wisdom, which is not the same thing [as knowledge]. In all pedagogical relationships an older person can always give information and know-how to the younger person, but a younger person can also bring a spiritual opening to it. I have to get along very well with younger people and now, even though I am not very well known, a certain number of young artists contact me and I’m in contact with them because they want me to look at their work, and I do that very willingly. But at the same time it’s not completely altruistic, because I learn things also from them. It’s not egoistic either—

It’s an exchange.

It’s an exchange, it’s a human relation, and I think that happens with the two couples, the two men and the two women [in La Sapienza]. And also there’s the idea of sacrifice, which is at the heart of all religions, actually, and the subject is opened already when they go to visit the Holy Shroud, because Goffredo realizes that, if it really isn’t the shroud of Christ, then he says it’s the shroud of another Christ that has also been sacrificed. There’s the idea that an artist is not a martyr but someone who gives, who makes a sacrifice in his life. We know nothing about Borromini’s personal life—he had apparently no real personal life. He had some friends with whom he had some intellectual exchanges, but otherwise he was a completely solitary person. And so when, in the scene that [dramatizes] Borromini’s relationship with his young assistant, he says that “I did the sacrifice for you,” Alexandre realizes it’s also for him, and that in a certain way Borromini made a sacrifice for him through his art and also through his life. It’s a sort of Christ-like idea that the artist is a human reflection of the sacrifice and the spiritual sacrifice.

There’s a lot of doubling in the film: visually, such as when the older couple is eating at the dinner table in the restaurant, and in a broader sense, in the two deaths that shape their lives. How did you choose that motif? Is it referencing architecture or is it something in a different direction?

No, I always say that one of the reasons why I feel so strange about my work is that modern thought is always conceptual—it begins with concepts and evolves rationally. Whereas I naturally have—it’s not something I choose [laughs]—what I call a “mythical” way of thinking.  In contemporary language, when someone says that something is “mythical,” that means it’s not true, but that’s the opposite of the word’s real meaning. The word “myth” comes from mutos in Greek, and in the archaic Greek and Homer, mutos means “truth-sayer,” and in the classical period it takes the meaning of a story, a narration. It always means a narration which by simple unfolding expresses a truth. And so I tend to think in mythical terms. I’m not very enthusiastic about psychoanalysis. I think I’m closer to Jungians than Freudians. So this idea of doubling as you say, it came naturally to me; it had to be part of the story, and afterward I realized what it meant, but at first it just came as if I was telling a story to children to bedtime and it came that way. And then I realized that I was right to do it because it had a lot of meaning.

How do you choose your actors? How much room do they have to experiment with a gesture or a vocal inflection?

I choose them mainly for what I feel that they have as a person. Also for their physical aspect, but for me the physical aspect always suggests something interior. Christelle Prot, I’ve worked with her in several films. I did my first film [Toutes les nuits, 01] with her, which I shot in 1999, so it’s been 15 years. And Fabrizio [Rongione], I’ve seen him in a lot of films—in all the Dardenne Brothers films and in certain Italian films. The Dardenne Brothers co-produced one of my films, and when we presented it in Brussels, I found him also interesting as a person, and in addition he’s bilingual. The two young actors, we had to do auditions to find them. There were auditions in Turin, and they sent me videos of the audition. I didn’t know Arianna had an important part in another film, but of all the girls I saw, she interested me the most. And Ludovico, I think for the [part of the] boy they did at least 30 or 35 videos, and the only one who interested me at all was Ludovico. He has a physical aspect which corresponds often to my young men characters, but there was something, his way of speaking, something interior which cannot be quantified. And when I met them both I was sure that they were the right choices.

As far as working with them, we just do usually one or two readings of the script before shooting, and I prevent them from making psychological intonations, because psychological intonations are always forced. They come from the psychological theater, and people have the habit now of accepting them as real or natural, but they’re not natural at all. For example, if you say a sentence, when there’s a punctuation you do a descending cadence and when there’s a full stop you do a big descending cadence. And in psychological acting, since the actor doesn’t want to recognize that he’s saying a text that has already been written, when there’s a punctuation he always goes up. So I just make them go down. Otherwise I just ask them to talk as if they were talking to themselves, because I don’t want them to think, I don’t want an intellectual interference with the flow of interior energy. When you speak to yourself, the words have a lot of importance, but you don’t try to convince yourself of something, so you’re not looking for rhetorical devices.

I voice a lot of affection for the actors that I film with Raphaël [O’Byrne, DP on all Green’s films]. Recently there was a screening in Paris of Toutes les nuits, my first film, which I hadn’t seen it in five years. And two of the main actors were there, and Raphael as well, and they were very moved. Someone came to see me and said that you can see how much compassion I have for the characters—and actually the actors because the actors are the characters. It’s a nice word: compassion not in a patronizing sense, but in the sense of a spiritual communion and understanding.

I have one more question. So the character you play—

The Chaldean.

You might see that as expressing some feelings you have about the U.S., or why you left the U.S.?

No, it’s related to the powerful connection between architecture and existence, for the group or for the individual, which the Chaldeans [evoke]. The Chaldeans are being chased out of Mesopotamia [editor’s note: an area that includes Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey], which is where they have been living for 2000 years, probably even more than that. But no, as far as what I call “Barbaria” [the U.S.] in the film, I had the impression when I was very young, 5 years old, that everything that goes through me is language, and what was spoken around me, I didn’t feel it had that value. So I started on a quest to find the language. When I was an adolescent, I thought I was going to go to Great Britain or Ireland to make my life through English, but I realized that even English, real English, doesn’t correspond to my interior being, and it had to be another language. So it became French. [Laughs] I respect English, but…

What made you choose that particular culture, the Chaldeans, anyway?

I just shot a documentary on the Basques, but the Basques resist, whereas before the “Barbarians” made their war in Iraq, there were a million Chaldeans. It’s not only that they have a religion, but they have a language, which is the only vestige of what was the general language of all the Middle East. It was the language of Jesus, it was the language of the Jews at the time of Jesus, and this language is only living as the language with this population now. It will be like Yiddish or another language where the people are dispersed, the survivors. After one generation, the language will disappear.

The language of the Chaldeans is one of the bases of our European culture, because it was the language of Jesus and the apostles and probably the first Gospel, and St. Matthew was probably first written in Aramaic. So it’s related to the fact that all of our culture is disappearing. But besides its value as the disappearance of a language from a human group, it could have been a Caucasian language or a language from South America, of course.

City on Fire

Not as flashy as John Woo, never as hyperkinetic as Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam is one of Hong Kong’s most underappreciated directors. He made his name with sophisticated, downbeat crime dramas that came to define a certain style of urban Hong Kong cinema in the Eighties and early Nineties. After getting his start in television at CTV and TVB, he directed five features before finding his stride with 1987’s City on Fire, the movie that provided the blueprint for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Released only a few months after John Woo and Tsui Hark’s A Better Tomorrow, it also starred Chow Yun-fat and together these two movies launched the heroic bloodshed genre in Hong Kong. His next movie with Chow was Prison on Fire (87) another big hit, and he quickly followed up with School on Fire (88), which was savaged by censors (who required 30 cuts for content and tone) and released opposite Jackie Chan’s Police Story II. Needless to say, it disappeared at the box office, but remains one of his best films and is crying out for a restoration.

After that came Wild Search (89) a laid-back romance with a sprinkle of action, and then Prison on Fire II (91), another big hit. Burned by his experience with School on Fire, Lam decided to make an apolitical movie, unleashing Full Contact (92), of which he says in an interview with the Hong Kong Film Archive, “I didn’t want to make a film that had anything to do with the sociological or political issues and situations of the time. I wanted to wash my hands of them and start with a clean slate. People had threatened to chop me up, accused me of having wrong political views and I didn’t want to have anything to do with those things. I wanted to make a film with a style no one could put a finger on.” After that he scored another hit with what might be his darkest and most unrelenting movie yet, Full Alert (97), which, in a way, was his farewell to Hong Kong and the crime genre. His next two movies were a big budget action film that flopped (The Suspect, 98) and a horror movie (Victim, 99). After turning in the light romantic comedy Looking for Mr. Perfect (03), he disappeared. Aside from directing a segment of the three-part film Triangle (07) he has been quiet for 11 years.

Until now.

Earlier this year, Ringo Lam announced that he was shooting a new film, Hustle (now called Wild City). Starring Shawn Yue, Joseph Chang, Louis Koo, and Jack Kao, it’s an epic of greed that the production company describes thusly:

“Welcome to Hong Kong, where everyone is in a fever about one thing: money. In this capitalist paradise, money is as vital as life itself, and everything has a price. Youth, dignity, dreams…they’re all for sale. Money separates people into classes—high and low—and it pushes the limits of what we think we can endure. The only way to resist the evil lure of money is love, and our innate human nature.”

A couple of weeks ago, Lam took time out from his shooting schedule on Wild City to talk with screenwriter Hiroshi Fukazawa. Their conversation took place at the Tao Li dim sum restaurant at Nikko Hotel in TST East, Kowloon on a Saturday afternoon over a pot of Oolong Tea, Spring Roll, Chasiu Rice Roll, Chicken Bundle, Garlic Squid dish, Prawn Dumplings and Ringo's favorite Siu Mai (reportedly he ate three out of the four).—G.H.

Ringo Lam on set

What was your first day of shooting on Wild City like? 

I fainted and fell due to heatstroke on the first day on set!

Are you serious?

Yeah, I totally passed out, it was too hot. I'm not kidding you. But I hung in there, tough as a rock, and completed the film. I’m feeling great now.

Can you tell us a little bit about the plot and characters of Wild City? How does it relate to City on Fire and Full Alert?

One might consider Wild City as part of the "City Trilogy" along with City on Fire and Full Alert. These films are all set in Hong Kong and are about people who are lost in the city. In Wild City the theme is about the temptation of money, and how it seduces the protagonists, but also forces them to challenge the plutocracy.

So many of your early films were about Hong Kong people with no power (prisoners, students, small-time criminals) fighting people with power (cops, big criminals, teachers, administrators). What does power look like in Hong Kong now? In your opinion, who is the winner in this society today and who has lost? Has it changed that much since the Eighties, or is it still the same? 

I believe this is a universal issue, in the US and in Japan too, every nation is fighting for its own benefit and for the interest of its citizens. People are no different, full of selfishness and greed. And when there are powerful people at a higher rank, there’s a grass roots movement. This is the basic structure of society, therefore there's always an urge to vent, to unleash the unfairness. My film is reflecting the reality of the situation. Nevertheless, my characters are not failures, they are just lost. Lost in the city, lost in the situation, or losing faith because they failed to be that someone they wanted to be and aren't happy about it. Compared to the Eighties? It's all the same here. I'd say the hardware has upgraded but the software remains unchanged. It may look different from the outside, but deep down inside it's all same—everyone is greedy and we're all selfish.

In Full Alert there are many scenes shot in areas of Hong Kong that don’t exist anymore. That film is almost like a record of a vanished time. Has the spirit of the city changed since then, or only the physical city? For better or for worse?

Bizarre is the word. It's getting more and more aggravating, like we’re living in hot water and we're this close to the boiling point. Society is much wealthier, but our living standard doesn't get any better because of the ridiculous inflation. Everything is way too expensive and unaffordable. In Hong Kong, the population has grown and there are more new buildings, but people can't afford to buy an apartment in them. There are empty houses everywhere here. Nowadays most people in Hong Kong live in cramped apartments that are almost uninhabitable. In Cantonese, we say " Clothing, Eating, Living, and Mobility" are the four essential human needs, and the living standard is just horrible. Then again, inequality between rich and poor is everywhere—it's a universal issue. Wall Street has the same problem, too. Obama didn't change a single thing, he didn't solve any problem. I‘d say back in George W. Bush’s days—we call him Bush Jr. in Chinese—everything seemed more peaceful. Asia hasn’t gotten any better since Obama began running the house, and the political environment is more intense than ever, things are unresolved and war has never stopped in the Middle East....it's simply bizarre.

Wild City

It’s been over 10 years since you directed a feature. What is it about this project that made you want to direct again?

It was a combination of things. It was about time for me to come back to making movies. My son has graduated from college and I think my wife has had enough of seeing me at home. I'm already 60 and my days of filming are numbered, or have begun counting down. I’ll be lucky if I can have 10 more years to make films. Wild City just came naturally to me. I'd like to make films that allow me to express myself. It's a device for me to unburden myself, to get things off my chest, and also a mirror to learn more about myself through the film I made. I don't make films for money anymore. 

Why did you stop directing for so long? 

Again, it was a variety of reasons. I was upset about the filming environment in Hong Kong during the early 2000’s and my last movie, Finding Mr. Perfect, tanked at the box office. Audiences would only embrace me for making the same movie over and over again, yet I don't see the point in repeating myself endlessly. Moreover, I had been working for more than 20 odd years in this business, so it was time for me to be the protagonist of my own life, in my own film where I’m the leading man. I wanted to spend more time with my family, to travel around the world, to enjoy nature, to revitalize my life, and, above all, to observe people and learn more about them. I wanted to seek resources, material, and subjects that were worth making into films. 

How has filmmaking changed in Hong Kong since you last directed a project?

I must say we have bigger budgets for production now, but ironically there're only a few bankable actors that audiences will buy tickets to see. Consider the drastic growth in patrons from the Mainland Chinese market: we're now making movies for over a billion people there. By comparison, there's just a little more than seven million in Hong Kong. And yet, only a handful of actors can get top billing on a film. A lack of film crews is also a major issue, nowadays. Most experienced filmmakers and crew members have moved and work in Mainland China now, they're out of Hong Kong. 

What bothers me the most is the decline of action stuntmen in Hong Kong. Due to the common accessibility of CGI in recent years no one does real action or real stunts like we used to film back in the Eighties. It's kind of unwise, in my opinion, as you can never outgun Hollywood in terms of CGI technology but real action and stunts were always our forte, our winning streak. The action scenes in Full Alert are all real, and we shot them secretly without a shooting permit, right in the street. After my filming hiatus, I was reunited with my fellow stuntmen who all showed up with gray hair—many disappeared and are unreachable now. There are absolutely no newcomers. The new kids in the field play a different game now, they all rely on CG very heavily, and you've gotta admit that CGI is way different from an authentic action stunt. In Hong Kong film’s heyday, we made a brand name for our authentic, cutting edge action sequences — we were selling the sense of realism and the feeling of genuine danger, not computer graphics. 

Looking back, Hong Kong movies in the Eighties redefined the action genre worldwide. It was a breakthrough because of our uniqueness. Hong Kong comedies and romances can never reach that high standard—perhaps with a few exceptions of art films like Wong Kar-wai's, but it's rare. When you talk about Hong Kong flicks, you talk about Hong Kong action films. Without well-equipped and skilled action stuntmen, the tradition of the Hong Kong action genre will vanish. I must say, today, in terms of real action and real car stunts, the rising Thai film business has already surpassed Hong Kong, and Korean films, which are a mixture of Hollywood and Hong Kong style, are also doing a better job than us. The only existing genre that Hong Kong filmmakers still excel at is fantasy martial arts, with flying swordsmen and weapons, like the movies by Tsui Hark, because they are based on the fundamental history of China. Korean films can’t tackle this genre due to a lack of stories and legends from history. But this genre is only a treat for Chinese, and not really for overseas audience interest.  

Wild City

Was it hard to return to the set, or did it feel like you never left?

After recovering from heatstroke on the first day, I’m back in good shape, but then again, when you give your full concentration and really care about the work you are doing, eventually you'll feel the pressure, both physically and mentally, because you want to do your best. It's intense and far from relaxing because you care a hell of a lot about it. Do I feel like I never left? Hell yeah, I’m in my element. In Chinese you say, “Every wish in my mind, my hands accomplished.”

Finally, did you enjoy your break from directing? Was it relaxing for you? What did you spend your time doing? Did you miss directing at all?

I've learnt to become more hopeful and spent time contemplating the meaning of optimism. I tended to avoid movies during those days. I stay away from movies if I can. I don't watch them, I don't even want to think about them. But I missed them when I was sleeping, in my dreams.  

Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me we'd get to see a more optimistic kind of Ringo Lam movie next?

I didn't intentionally try to reinforce the optimism in my films. All I can say is some of the central characters get the chance to survive at the end. However, the continued survival of these people won't change a thing. The world still runs its course. 

Hiroshi Fukazawa directed the documentary Development Hell (07) about the making of Bodyguards & Assassins, and he writes screenplays in Hong Kong.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

The Dragons and Tigers program at the Vancouver International Film Festival may not be as swanky as TIFF, but since 1985 it’s been bringing more experimental, artisier, and more obscure Asian movies to Canada than its Toronto cousin. A reader reminded me that it’s only fair to cover VIFF if I’m covering TIFF, so here’s this year’s Dragons and Tigers lineup in the order of what I think sounds like the most fun.

HAEMOO (South Korea, Shim Sung-Bo)

This big movie about the horrifying human smuggling incident that resulted in dozens of dead immigrants, based on a true story and produced by Bong Joon-Ho, has been getting rave reviews.

MAN ON HIGH HEELS (South Korea, Jang Jin)

Some folks might find the topic patronizing—a typical tough Korean cop beating up suspects for the truth is actually transgendered, a woman trapped in a hard dude’s body. But the director is Jang Jin (Welcome to Dongmakol, The Recipe, Going By the Book), one of Korea’s smartest, funniest directors who consistently delivers thoughtful, emotional movies that always entertain but never pander.

NON-FICTION DIARY (South Korea, Jung Yoon-Suk)

One of the highlights of the festival, this agitprop documentary about Korea in the early Nineties focuses on the Jijon Gang, who killed five people for what they said were political reasons. An exploration of Korea’s transition from military rule to democracy, it’s being hailed not just as a great documentary but as one of the most fascinating movies from Korea last year.

UNCLE VICTORY (China, Zhang Meng)

My pick for the movie I’m most excited about, it sounds like a Mainland version of the Bad News Bears. Directed by Zhang Meng (The Piano in a Factory) it’s all about a violent ex-con who takes over a kindergarten. It won the Jury prize at the Shanghai Film Fest, despite enormous controversy when the actor playing Uncle Victory (Huang Haibo) was caught hiring a prostitute and sentenced to six months in a re-education camp.

THE MIDNIGHT AFTER (Hong Kong, Fruit Chan)

Sales agent Fortissimo Films did a great job of keeping this extraordinary movie off the festival circuit in North America, and now the buzz around it is pretty much dead. Too bad, but at least Vancouver is in for a treat. A science fiction flick in which the passengers on a mini-bus discover they’re the only people left in the city. Even the trailer is amazing. Also extraordinary is Simon Yam’s hair.

THE HORSES OF FUKUSHIMA (Japan, Matsubayashi Yoju)

Try to resist this documentary. Director Matsubayashi Yoju was shooting in Fukushima when he came across a stable of injured horses who were slated to be sold for their meat. With the horses now radioactive and inedible, their owner decided that rather than destroy them he’d train them to take part in an annual Shinto horse ritual. The focus is on one failed racehorse in particular because “its injuries included an embarrassingly inflamed penis.” Also, it’s only 74 minutes long.  I’ve already got my ticket. The Hollywood Reporter liked it too.

JUNGLE SCHOOL (Indonesia, Riri Riza)

Indonesian director Riri Riza just can’t stop making movies about kids going to school. In 2008 he scored a massive hit with Laskar Pelangi about kids in the country going to school, and here he is again with Jungle School, about a teacher running a school in the middle of nowhere. And you know what? If it’s half as good as Laskar Pelangi you should see it.

BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (China, Diao Yinan)

A festival favorite since it premiered at Berlin last year and won the Golden Bear, this murder mystery set in the frosty north of China has been getting rave reviews.

BLIND MASSAGE (China, Lou Ye)

One of China’s preeminent arthouse directors, Lou Ye, has been slowly moving more and more into the mainstream, and this is a surprisingly gentle and humane film for a Chinese arthouse director. Film festivals usually prefer scathing critiques of man’s inhumanity to man from Mainland Chinese filmmakers, but Lou Ye’s ensemble drama about the blind and semi-blind workers at a massage clinic is just beautiful. And the reviews are great.

OW (Japan, Suzuki Yohei)

The kind of movie that VIFF was designed to show, this low budget Japanese whatzit is a semi-science fiction film about a mysterious sphere that appears in an apartment, just hovering. Described as political, funny, and deeply strange, the trailer pretty much confirms that it’s worth a watch.

NUOC 2030 (Vietnam, Nguyen-Vo Nghiem-Minh)

Billed as “Vietnam’s first sci-fi eco-thriller” this murder mystery looks to be ambitious, lo-fi sci-fi.

SHARING (Japan, Shinozaki Makoto)

Part horror film, part fantasy movie, part art flick, Shinozaki Makoto turns in a movie about two women obsessed by the 2011 Tsunami: one lost her fiancé in it, and the other is staging a play about it.

UNCERTAIN RELATIONSHIPS SOCIETY (Hong Kong, Heiward Mak)

One of Hong Kong’s most frustrating and inconsistent directors, Heiward Mak sometimes makes movies that feel fresh and new and vital, and sometimes she makes movies that feel dead and dull and over-marketed. Now she’s got a new film, this time about five Hong Kongers in their twenties and how they interact with each other over six years. Might be a masterpiece, might be crap. With Heiward Mak you never know, but it’s usually worth the risk.

REKORDER (Philippines, Mikhail Red)

Already getting great reviews this version of “guy records everything in his life and accidentally records a murder and then it goes viral” is supposedly far more fascinating than many other attempts to make movies about moviemaking.

COMING HOME (China, Zhang Yimou)

Gong Li and Zhang Yimou, together again. This time, China’s flagship Serious Director gets to make a movie about the ultra-sensitive Cultural Revolution as long as it revolves around a character (Li) who has amnesia and can’t remember it.

DISCONCERTO (Japan, Omori Tatsushi)

It’s described as super fun and incredibly charming, but that’s all I know about the latest movie from ultra-serious Japanese director Omori Tatsushi (Whispering of the Gods, 05). There is a trailer, though.

FLOWING STORIES (Hong Kong, Tsiang Tsui-shan)

Sometimes considered the great female hope of Hong Kong movies, Tsiang won “Best New Director” at the Hong Kong Film Awards for her first feature, Big Blue Lake, and this documentary about a single family, the Laus. Where they immigrated, what happened to them, and how they live continues her fascination with her hometown, the New Territories village of Ho Chung.

A CORNER OF HEAVEN (China, Zhang Miaoyan)

Director Zhang Miaoyan was born in Manchuria during the Cultural Revolution, went to UC Berkley and became a writer, and this is his second film. His first film, Xiaolin Xiaoli, got a pretty good review from The Hollywood Reporter.

THE FURTHEST END AWAITS (Japan, Chiang Hsiu-chiung)

A Japanese flick directed by a Taiwanese woman who spent years as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s assistant, this movie about the friendship between two women is being called beautiful and “quite an achievement,” as well as garnering the inevitable Ozu comparisons.

THE IRON MINISTRY (China, J.P. Sniadecki)

A documentary co-produced by America and China, the director spent three years shooting footage on trains to offer up this well-reviewed documentary about China and its train system.

MEN WHO SAVE THE WORLD (Malaysia, Liew Seng Tat)

This is playing at TIFF and the question remains: is it a train wreck or a good time at the movies? Variety is decrying it as “neo-colonialist” and “loaded with racially problematic scenes and homophobic gags,” but this Malaysian comedy about a haunted house seems to be getting booked into lots of film festivals and has the support of a whole slew of big name international arthouse production outfits like the Hubert Bals Fund and the Sundance Institute.

EXIT (Taiwan, Chienn Hsiang)

Normally if you describe a film as a “subtly beautiful Taiwanese urban drama” I’ll run screaming in the other direction, but this flick at least has a great pedigree. Star Chen Shiang-chyi has appeared in something like six Tsai Ming-liang movies and director Chienn Hsiang was the cinematographer who shot 20:30:40 and the dazzling Zone Pro Site: The Moveable Feast, so at least you know it’ll look good.

THE SUN THE MOON AND THE HURRICANE (Indonesia, Andri Cung)

Let Tony Rayns’s blurb decide you on this one because I’m not qualified: “Andri Cung’s debut feature is essentially about the ways we all learn from experience…It flirts with schmaltz in a few voice-overs and with melodramatic excess in its closing scenes, but is for the most part acutely observed, exceptionally well-acted, and ardently sincere.”

THE DOSSIER (China, Zhu Rikun)

A two-hour documentary about Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan writer who grew up as a Han Chinese and then rejected that identity to embrace her roots as a Tibetan, she’s an outspoken online advocate for justice in Tibet. It’s described as a “sharply designed, formally innovative documentary” which will either make you buy a ticket or go get drunk.

HILL OF FREEDOM (South Korea, Hong Sang-Soo)

I’m not a Hong Sang-Soo fan, and I think his career has mostly been about showing movies at film festivals rather than to paying audiences. And yet here he is again, with another movie playing film fests. Nevertheless, programmers adore him, so I’m probably wrong.

REVIVRE (South Korea, Im Kwon-Taek)

I have no patience for old directors who make movies about old men trying to have sex with young girls, but despite my puritanical and judgmental attitude this latest film from Korea’s grand old man of cinema is getting surprisingly good (albeit qualified) reviews.

JOURNEY TO THE WEST (Taiwan, Tsai Ming-liang)

Noted Taiwanese arthouse director, Tsai Ming-liang, is making lots of movies that are about a monk walking very slowly. This is one of them. I’d rather shoot myself, but then again I like having fun at the movies, so what do I know?

The Wonders

The Midnight Sun Festival in Finland defies the see-it-first mandate that guides so much programming and critical response, but without being a mere exercise in cinephilic nostalgia. Founded in 1986 by Aki Kaurismäki, Mika Kaurismäki, and critic/filmmaker Peter von Bagh, the festival (which ran June 11 to 15) features a mix of up-and-coming filmmakers, retrospectives of underappreciated and established directors, obscure genre surveys, and contemporary Finnish cinema. Nestled among ancient forests, the five-block-wide town of Sodankylä boasts intimate, easily accessible venues that allow you to drift from one fantastic film to the next without any pesky downtime. With 24 hours of Arctic sunlight and screenings running nearly round the clock, you really don’t have an excuse to sleep.

On my final afternoon at the festival, I watched Alice Rohrwacher’s sweet, luminous second feature, The Wonders, in a peculiarly appropriate circus tent, then trotted some 500 feet to Sodankylä’s singular film theater to catch Gleb Panfilov’s mannered but impressive 1983 television adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Vassa. I followed that cinematic feast with a pancake-wrapped soja makkara, a beer, and a program of mind-blowing Yugoslavian Black Wave shorts from Oberhausen’s archive, co-programmed by FC’s European editor Olaf Möller and Oberhausen programmer Lars Henrik Glass. (The standout: Jovan Jovanović and Mika Milošević’s Kolt 15 GAP, a 1971 documentary whatsit powered by Stanoje Cebic’s Lenny-Bruce-meets-socialist-pioneer-leader-meets-schizophrenic-street-preacher performance.) Having just experienced the extended tedium of SXSW—which privileged parties, promotional gimmicks, Lady Gaga, and app launches over film—I found Midnight Sun not just refreshing but edifying, as members of the press, filmmakers, locals, and groups of visiting students camping out in tents could all rub shoulders and rejoice in the pleasures of the medium.

The Outlaw and His Wife

In this cinephilic spirit, if something was shot on film, it was screened on film. Introducing a restoration of Victor Sjöström’s Swedish silent The Outlaw and His Wife (18), von Bagh said that digital restorations were “destroying film culture.” These sentiments are echoed in the festival program’s brief cover note, which concisely (and passionately) argues against conflating digital with eternal. Judging from the audience’s reaction to von Bagh’s declaration, it was clear that the film projections weren’t some quirky bonus, but the way things should be. The Outlaw and His Wife, which was accompanied live by the impressive Matti Bye Ensemble, is not just uniquely beautiful (as noted by both the Cahiers critics and Louis Delluc) but an engaging story that goes far beyond its titular premise.

In Sjöström’s story set in 18th-century Iceland, a thief seeks employment at a wealthy widow’s farm, and soon enough, they fall in love. When the widow’s brother-in-law, an unsavory lawman, comes to arrest the thief, she rejects her life of comfort and flees into the mountains with her lover. Blending elements of tragedy and humor, as well as featuring mountaintop stunts performed by—as director Pawel Pawlikowsi put it—“some fat actor,” the lost eight-reeler achieved a sophistication most contemporary films could only hope to attain. The very next evening, the restored 149-minute version of G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (25) also played to a packed house, again with the accompaniment of the Matti Bye Ensemble. Savaged by censors during its original release (according to Pabst’s editor, the theater owner insisted on cuts after opening night), it had been unavailable in anything close to a complete form in the years since.

Bye Bye Africa

Almost as habitually under-viewed by mass-audiences are the films of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the Chadian-born director who has lived in France since 1982 and who received a complete retrospective this year. Not unlike Mati Diop’s Mille soleils, Haroun’s Bye Bye Africa (99) explores expatriation, longing, and film history, but takes place during the ascendance of Nollywood in the late Nineties when traditional film theaters were being closed across the entire continent. Dry Season (06) and A Screaming Man (10) also center upon periods of transition, both personal (between a father/father figure and a son) and historical (the aftermath of Chad’s civil war), and were screened in gorgeous 35mm prints that showcased their sparse, meditative visuals.

The problems of filmmakers in small nations are often shared regardless of region: low visibility at home or abroad, and the pressure to adopt aesthetics and borrow elements from either Hollywood, feel-good American indies, or a kind of inoffensive mishmash of Ousmane Sembène and Walter Salles (usually funded by the French government). Thankfully, Apeiron from Finnish visual artist Maria Ruotsala avoids all of these habits in making its gutsy philosophical and aesthetic statement. Eschewing any semblance of naturalism—it was shot in the synthetic hypermodern environs of Dubai but features only Scandinavian actors speaking in Swedish—Ruotsala’s film centers on two married researchers. The couple works at an institute that studies the criminally insane on one floor (hell) and their catatonic victims on another (purgatory, at best). Dissecting emotional states rather than dramatizing them, Apeiron is a challenge to watch, but a welcome one, anchored by fantastic performances from Sampo Sarkola and Irina Björklund.

New Babylon in Socalism

Genre films were not absent from the festival, but working within conventions doesn’t have to mean breaking out the cookie-cutter. Three of note, all from Finnish filmmakers, were Above Dark Waters, a deeply personal narrative feature by former True Blood hot body Peter Franzén about growing up with his abusive stepfather; Virpi Suutari’s documentary Garden Lovers, which examines couples whose landscaping provides ample metaphors for life and their relationships; and Von Bagh’s own Socialism, which combines footage from both popular and arcane cinema to fashion a history of life under Communism in Europe. Olaf Möller’s master-class program of Seventies French political thrillers—including The Night Caller (75), Judge Fayard Called the Sheriff (77), The Secret (74), Last Known Address (70), and Série noire (79)—provided ample doses of paranoia about government, gunplay, and socialist subtext. Jean-Paul Belmondo, then 42 years of age, does all of his own stunts in the giallo-influenced Night Caller, leaping across moving Paris Métro carriages at rush hour and hanging from a helicopter by wire.

With its adventuresome, buzz-blind selection, Midnight Sun takes its own risks (at the sprightly age of 28) and to extraordinary effect. Though I haven’t been to many film festivals, let alone the “important” ones, I have no trouble declaring Midnight Sun my favorite by far. May the sun never set.

When Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs premiered in Venice last year, Guy Lodge predicted in his Variety review that the film would only appeal to the director’s hardcore fans, and that it was possibly “best suited for the gallery circuit.” As it happens, Stray Dogs this week gets a theatrical release in the U.S. through Cinema Guild—although it still seems fated to stay unreleased in Britain. Even so, it’s hard to argue with the idea that Stray Dogs is unlikely to expand Tsai’s following significantly. It’s a challenging film that pushes his characteristic long-take play with duration to new bounds (somehow, it feels too negative to say “extremes”), while withdrawing some of the more immediate pleasures of his earlier work, like relatively transparent narrative, the direct emotional gratification of, say, What Time Is It There? (00), and comedy, which in his work has ranged from Keaton-esque deadpan (still just visible here, in traces) to outright camp (the lurid musical sequences of The Hole [98] and The Wayward Cloud [05]). 

The question is, of course, whether it’s a problem if Tsai is really only addressing his devoted “happy few.” Was it a problem that late Beckett became increasingly, ever more rigorously Beckettian, precluding himself from ever having an off-Broadway hit? Or that, at some point in his career, it became clear that Pierre Boulez’s compositions would be short on hummable tunes? For many critics of the avant-garde, such creative intransigence, which accepts as inevitable the loss of contact with a wider public, is indeed a problem, often decried as elitism or as a defeatist abandonment of artists’ supposed social responsibility. In any case, there’s no doubt that Tsai is now very clear where he stands as a filmmaker: in his Venice press notes to Stray Dogs, he commented, “I have become tired of cinema,” and said he had no further interest in making “the kinds of films that expect the patronage of cinema audiences.”

Some might view such declarations as loftily arrogant, but Tsai’s recent work bears out his sincerity. Stray Dogs is Tsai’s first narrative feature (insofar as it’s narrative at all, which is moot) since 2006’s I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, of which the new film is a kind of continuation: both address themes of urban rootlessness, homelessness, and lost identity, both are set partly in vast abandoned buildings left in a state of incompletion. Tsai followed that film with Face (09), an “art film” not least in the sense that it was commissioned by the Louvre: a fragmented nonnarrative spectacle that featured his perennial lead Lee Kang-sheng in Paris, among a starry French cast (Laetitia Casta, Fanny Ardant, Mathieu Amalric, et al) who generally seemed adrift and bewildered. This rarefied and, yes, self-indulgent exercise was the Tsai film most likely to alienate even his most committed believers.

Since then, Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng have worked on a set of short pieces (generally known as the Walker series), most recently this year’s 56-minute Journey to the West: a cycle in which Lee, as a Buddhist monk, walks exceptionally and breathtakingly slowly across various settings. Filmed on the streets of Marseilles, Journey—the only one that I’ve seen—is a mesmerizing performance piece built on the principle of Zen discipline, but you might also see in it a deadpan joke on the very idea of “slow cinema,” pushing the idea of decelerated, protracted action to vertiginous and ultimately comic lengths (especially when Denis Lavant appears, following Lee at a distance, equally slowly). I saw Journey projected in an IMAX theater at this year’s Berlinale, where the vastness of the image and the incongruous nature of the venue for such an ostensibly intimate piece made the occasion less like a standard film screening, something more like a singular art event, the cinema itself becoming a de facto gallery space.

Equally, Stray Dogs doesn’t need to be actually shown on the gallery circuit for it to be a “gallery film” of sorts: as with the works of James Benning or Sharon Lockhart, Tsai now makes films that transform the auditorium into a different kind of space, in which viewers become attentive, and self-consciously present, in a way they wouldn’t be when occupying the exact same seats to watch, say, Let’s Be Cops.

Of course, not everyone experiences a Tsai film in this idealized fashion. You might go into a rapturous trance at Stray Dogs, while I might shift in my seat, or check my watch, or find myself yearning for the lightness and humor of his Goodbye Dragon Inn (03). And Tsai knows this. The penultimate shot of Stray Dogs, lasting just under 13 minutes, is a low-angle head-and-shoulders shot that, until shortly before it ends, consists of a man and a woman looking at something off-screen. Apart from a camera movement at the very start, circling in on the duo, the shot is absolutely still, allowing us to focus on the different watching styles of the two characters. The woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) gazes straight ahead, expressionless, immobile, hardly blinking—and after a while, a tear rolls down her face. The man (Lee Kang-sheng) sways with a sullen expression, occasionally hangs his head or takes a swig of drink, as if in defiant refusal to be affected by whatever it is that’s in front of him.

The following, final shot reveals that to be a charcoal mural depicting a river, a beach, distant mountains. We don’t know what the picture is doing there in this vast abandoned concrete building (spontaneous urban art, reclaiming dead space, or an abandoned luxury commission?), but this cavernous hall has become a gallery, occupied by two viewers responding very differently to what’s on show. By extension, you might see the mural as also a cinema screen, one that happens to be showing a supremely immobile piece of “slow cinema.” And, as we know from previous Tsai films, people react to cinema differently: in Goodbye Dragon Inn (03), set in an old Taipei movie house on the verge of closure, some customers watch a wuxia classic with rapture, as if hypnotized, while others treat it as incidental background for their peripatetic shufflings or erotic explorations in the dark, and one punter sits chomping sunflower seeds and tossing the husks with blithe disregard for the film, the space, the audience alike. Tsai knows that people watch films differently, whether they’re thrill-packed genre pieces or hyper-rarefied art contemplations—so I can’t imagine him being too troubled by, or unprepared for, the reputedly formidable walk-out rate that Stray Dogs incurred in Venice.

Still, you don’t have to be signed up to the Tsai cause to appreciate Stray Dogs; it’s essential viewing if you’re interested in what cinema can do with time, space, fragmentation. It’s also a compelling piece of poetic realism: Tsai remains, along with Pedro Costa, cinema’s foremost painter of urban poverty. Lee Kang-sheng plays a man whose job is to stand motionless by city roadsides, often in torrential rain, holding a placard that advertises luxury real estate. His current makeshift home is an empty goods container, where he looks after his young son and daughter, played by Lee Yi-chieh and Lee Yi-cheng (Tsai is their real-life godfather, Lee Kang-sheng their uncle). One of three women we see may be the children’s mother, or perhaps all three are: Tsai has claimed that he began with one role but divided it into three because of illness during the shoot. In the opening shot, one woman (Yang Kuei-mei) sits by the children’s bedside brushing her long hair, which rhymes visually with the strange satiny texture of the black wall behind them (we later learn that it’s fungal growth resulting from rain damage to the building). A second woman (Lu Yi-ching) works in a supermarket, where she sometimes looks after the children. She makes occasional night visits, again in pouring rain, to the abandoned building, all concrete caverns, dark corridors, and Piranesi-like stairway perspectives, where she feeds stray dogs on the ground floor, and contemplates the charcoal painting upstairs. Then there’s a younger woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who, in the film’s closing stretch, seems able to give the children a relatively secure home life, mildewed walls notwithstanding.

Are the three women incarnations of one mother, or three separate beings? What is their, or her, history with the father? Little is made clear, and we are left to piece together a vestigial narrative from a chain of disconnected episodes, a jigsaw with pieces of radically different sizes. Stray Dogs is composed of (by my rough count) 73 shots in 136 minutes, a handful very short, some running to three minutes, and two of extraordinary length. One is that penultimate gazing shot, the other a bizarre, deeply unsettling 11-minute single take in which the father discovers in his bed a cabbage which the children have roughly painted with a face, dubbing it “Cabbage Lee” or “Miss Big Boobs” and making it their toy; in a state of alarming emotional meltdown and/or drunkenness, the father variously kisses it, attempts to asphyxiate it with a pillow, and chomps it to bits, weeping uncontrollably. It’s another intensely compelling Lee Kang-sheng performance moment, a display of the father’s real-time breakdown, variously evoking desperation, rage, warped erotic passion, frenzied abjection—yet it’s also grotesquely comic.

But we’re not given any clear directions on what sort of emotions we’re witnessing. In another scene, the father impassively intones what first seems to be a poem—“In anger my hair stands on end / And as the rain stops / I launch a chill cry at the heavens… / My valiant heart loses hope / My exploits are nothing but mud and dust…”—which he then begins to sing, ever louder, eyes welling up but barely blinking. We don’t know if we’re seeing an expression of anger, defeat, determination, or madness. Even when Tsai seems to bring us closest to his characters, we still can’t easily make an affective connection. Emotion may be on display in Stray Dogs, but the extreme, even melodramatic tenor of its enactment makes it all the more alienating; it’s impossible, I think, to be directly touched in this film as we are by the subtler signals of, say, The Hole (remember that tender Chapline-sque shorthand of arms reaching out to make contact?).

Tsai regulars will unarguably get something extra from Stray Dogs, because of the ample echoes of his previous work. He is still cinema’s great poet of lousy plumbing, a mantle he inherited from Tarkovsky. Where earlier films had characters’ homes invaded by water seepages, the characters here effectively live in the rain: the third woman’s dwelling is ostensibly a solid shelter, but it seems virtually to be composed of rain, its blackened walls with their eerily luminous white streaks actually suggesting something like a solidified downpour (the astonishing production design is by Tsai himself and Masa Liu, and the photography, which again features some of Tsai’s trademark skewed perspectives, by Liao Pen-jung and Sung Wen Zhong). As the camera scans the distressed walls in close-up, the woman tells the children about the water damage: “The house started crying and crying… Can you see the tears?”

The counterpart to this seemingly inhospitable, yet truly lived-in place is a secure, dry, solid dream house that the father visits: one of the apartments he advertises. It’s made of glass, steel, and marble, with sinuous, spiral staircases—another version of the deluxe illicit love nest in Tsai’s Vive l’Amour (94). It’s soulless, a pure mercantile space, yet it’s the one place that the father gets a decent dry night’s sleep, offering a rare touch of Tsai’s almost subliminal humor: a shot of the father, asleep between pristine snowy sheets, reveals one bare foot comically sticking out of the bed’s corner.

For Tsai regulars, Stray Dogs also offers the latest report on the gradual metamorphosis of Lee Kang-sheng, whose ageing has become increasingly tangible from film to film. Tsai is interested in what time and the elements do to faces and bodies, as well to buildings: it’s no accident that he has twice worked with Jean-Pierre Léaud. But Lee, in the 22 years since Rebels of the Neon God, seems to have had it worse than the young Antoine Doinel. A sweet-faced, impish ingénu in Tsai’s early films, in Stray Dogs he’s thickened by age and looks physically weary, and in certain shots, his face is alarmingly bloated, eyes so red round the rims they look inflamed by hard living, sleeplessness, or over-exposure to cold and rain.

Personally, I found Stray Dogs as mesmerizing as anything Tsai has done, but not as satisfying as his best work: I missed the richness of those films with a more tangible narrative drift, or stronger humor, or more surprising sexual intensity (The Wayward Cloud, for example); conversely, it’s free of that film’s lurid facetiousness. But Stray Dogs shows considerable compassion and political anger at urban abandonment, of people and buildings alike, and those feelings resonate even while Tsai strips out the narrative shape that usually allows us to connect emotionally with human dramas in a realistic context. Stray Dogs resembles the houses in which it takes place: an emptied-out frame of a narrative that we’re left to explore, a space inhabited by human presences that sometimes feel irreducibly alive (as the children do in their scenes), sometimes like ghosts. This may not be Tsai’s most inspired film, or the one that will haunt you most profoundly, but it’s a compelling case of a director’s work pushing right up against the edges of its possibility.

In 1976, the alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder solved his first murder as an unlicensed private investigator. He continued closing unsavory cases for 35 years, a restless witness to the changing fortunes and crime rates of New York City. Scudder is the fictional creation of Lawrence Block, a prolific storyteller and a master detailer of the bars, diners, and subways of New York, those mute witnesses to so much death. Block has written 17 Matthew Scudder books so far, tracking this brooding sad sack through Alcoholics Anonymous and his deepening relationship with lover (and prostitute) Elaine. The books add up to more than a series of closed cases, and to something like an entire life lived.

Block hasn’t had much luck with Hollywood adaptations of his work, the most prominent disappointment being 8 Million Ways to Die (86), a chaotic production which transposed these essentially New York novels to Los Angeles. A Walk Among the Tombstones, from the tenth novel in the series, published in 1992, breaks that streak of bad luck. Written and directed by Scott Frank, and starring Liam Neeson as Scudder, it accurately conveys the books’ grimy sense of place, as well as Scudder’s ever-shifting moral compass. Scudder is hired by a drug trafficker to track down the psychos who kidnapped and sliced up his wife—and who may have been committing similar attacks for years.

I spoke with Mr. Block at one of Scudder’s old haunts, The Flame diner on the Upper West Side, about his writing process, Hollywood nightmares past, and the long road to cinemas for A Walk Among the Tombstones, which opens September 19.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Where did the Matthew Scudder character originate?

An agent suggested that it would be good if I developed a series about a New York cop. I thought about that, and realized that I preferred an outsider perspective, and I didn’t want to get bogged down in bureaucracy, didn’t want to have to learn all that crap that my friend Evan Hunter [aka Ed McBain] did so well in the 87th Precinct series—I didn’t want to write that. And I thought an ex-cop would work. There was a book at the time, written by a fellow who used to hang at The Lion’s Head [in Greenwich Village]—his name was Leonard Shecter, he wrote a book called On the Pad, with a cop named Bill Phillips, who was a Knapp Commission witness and all that. From that I got the notion of a cop who took shortcuts, and who was not constitutionally opposed to clean graft, and that sort of thing. And I started writing and the character happened. It started out as three books for Dell; they didn’t do much. And the character was sufficiently alive for me so I stayed with it, and it’s gone on a long time.

Part of what I love about the Scudder books is the attention to detail paid to New York neighborhoods. Can you talk about when you moved here, and what your relationship was with the city?

I always knew I would wind up here. I first came here when I was 10 years old. My father and I came down here for a long weekend over Christmas vacation. He was from New York originally. Had a wonderful time. It was sometime after my third year in high school—I went to Bennett, in Buffalo—that I realized I wanted to be a writer. I assumed that would mean I would be living in New York. The college I went to was Antioch, and I got a job my second year, lived in the Village.

Were you studying creative writing?

I was nominally an English major, but I took as many history courses as I did English. I was there for two years, took a year off, then the job at a literary agency and I went back to school for a year. By that time I was writing professionally, and didn’t take classes as seriously as one had to. By the end of that year, I was out of there.

So you didn’t graduate.

Oh, no.

Was it easier to make a living as a writer back then?

I don’t know how anyone can come to New York anymore. It was never easy to make a living as a writer, though. Never in history, I think. And it’s probably not supposed to be. I think the arts have to have a high threshold.

Did you take a lot of day jobs?

I never did. I always wrote. I was rapid.

When did Scott Frank first approach you about A Walk Among the Tombstones?

He optioned it not long after it came out. I think it was ’92 or ’93. And maybe ’96 or ’97 was when the production was first supposed to happen. It moved along, and we were four or five weeks away from commencement of principal photography, when the wheels came off.

Who was going to play Scudder?

Harrison Ford was going to do it. And then he decided he didn’t like the person who was going to direct it, or something, or whatever. He’d probably explain it himself as “artistic differences”.

That’s what they always say, yeah.

That’s why the marriages fail too [laughs]. Then it was dead for ages. Jersey Films renewed the option for a few years, and then that stopped. Then two years ago, he [Scott Frank] got back in touch. After a flirtation with another director or something, he realized he ought to direct it himself. And I’m so glad he made that decision. And I was thrilled when Liam was cast. He has that gravitas and a sense of an inner life.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Had you seen Scott Frank’s work before this?

Yes. Out of Sight and Get Shorty [for which Frank wrote the screenplays]. Not just excellent scripts, but they really captured the feel of Elmore Leonard. I was going to say it’s not that easy to do, but not that many people try.

Did you see versions of the Tombstones script?

I didn’t want to. I was delighted to go to the set and watch, but I had a feeling if I read the script that the changes would bother me. More so than on screen.

I was a little disappointed they did not include the Elaine character.

So was I. So in retrospect was Scott. He’s sorry that got lost.

One of the things I really enjoyed was the location shooting in New York neighborhoods you rarely see in movies.

The house where they shot the scenes where Scudder’s on the phone—the Russian’s house—that was in a house in Whitestone, Queens, which I’ve never been to before. It’s evidently a heavy mobster-type neighborhood. And this particular house, that we were able to rent as a location, was this great, decaying mansion. It was quite impressive.

What they couldn’t do: Scudder, especially in this book, goes everywhere by subway. Well, it costs a ton to shoot anything in the subway. Even if you want him walking up the staircase out of a subway tunnel, you have to block it off and get permissions. It would have kicked the shit out of the project. Much cheaper to put him in the cab [laughs]. Scott was apologetic about that.

So, I think there will be more [movies in the series]. Depending on how it does. Scott would like to do more, and I understand Liam would like to do more. The easy one to do next, in terms of story, probably, is A Ticket to the Boneyard, because it’s not a whodunit, it’s more just a thriller.

So it’s safe to assume this is the happiest you’ve been having one of your books adapted into a movie?

Aside from getting paid, there was nothing happy about the other ones [laughs]. The pictures weren’t good, nor did they do well, in critical reception or anything else. It’s easy to like this better.

8 Million Ways to Die

I recently watched 8 Million Ways to Die, and it’s so strange, as if they tried to make it into Miami Vice.

They didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Oliver Stone optioned it originally, at the first go-through. At the time he wanted me to work on the script with him. And I spent one evening with him and... I didn’t want to. That may have been the wrong decision on my part, or a very good, important decision, I don’t know.

Artistic differences?

Well, I don’t know. I think I would have found it, a difficult experience. Then he dropped out of the picture at some point, and they started shooting the thing without a finished script. The snow-cone scene was improvised. And it has the advantages of an improvised scene, the freshness, and the disadvantages that they didn’t know what they were doing. They don’t know where they’re going. And they didn’t know how to get out of it. And Jeff Bridges [who plays the Scudder character in the film] has said that the whole thing is one he’d really like to have back. Ashby’s greatest strength as a director was in the cutting room, and they took the cut away from him. And whoever did cut it, according to Bridges, didn’t use the best takes. Ever. And the set was by no means a happy place.

I’ve read Ashby was not in a good place at that time.

You could have listed this picture in an autopsy as a cause of death. He was bottoming out. I made one visit to the set when Ashby happened to be out there, at some lot in El Segundo or something. We exchanged a sentence or two. There was this air of utter sadness coming off of him. Not encouraging. I think coke had really done a job on him, I gather.

The Bernie Rhodenbarr adaptation was the Whoopi Goldberg movie, Burglar (87)?

The casting was the least of its sins, I’ve always felt. It didn’t have much to do with the book, but you could make a movie with Whoopi playing the lead. The writer/director gave us Police Academy one through 18, or whatever.

Have you talked to other writers about getting adapted?

Oh, sure. You know, I was saying this earlier today, and it’s that, when you see a picture and it’s lousy, it seems almost unnecessarily picky to point that out, because it’s such a miracle it got made. So many things don’t.

Do you have any stories of movies that almost got made that you wish were completed?

Yeah. There was one I wrote the screenplay for. Fellow named Richard Rubinstein optioned the Keller books [Block’s series about a hit man]. Somebody else did a first draft, then I did a couple drafts. Came to be called Hit Man. Jeff Bridges was on board to play Keller. Martin Bell was going to direct. And it didn’t quite fly. There was some interest, but never enough interest. This would have been the early Aughts. Richard renewed the option every year for a while, before he finally said he was going to let it go. I think there’s a chance it may wind up being a TV series, which is what it should have been all along. But we will see.

You’ve also written many screenplays. I’m curious about your collaboration with Wong Kar Wai on My Blueberry Nights (07). How was it like working with him?

Not too much to say. It’s the first movie of his to have a script. We wound up working together because he’s a big fan of the Scudder books. And he got in touch, and wanted to option this, and do that. He had a movie he wanted me to write, with Nicole Kidman and set in 1937 Shanghai. Why he thought I was the person to write that I don’t know [laughs]. Nothing ever happened until Blueberry Nights. It was strange, because he’s an absolutely brilliant filmmaker, but he’s not really a story guy. It’s an experience I’m glad I had.

Is there much of your script on the screen?

Some. It was hard to write for him because his idea of the story kept changing while I was typing it. That kind of thing. And when he did settle on an idea, it suddenly became carved in stone, irrespective of its merits. As I said, I’m glad I had the experience, but I wouldn’t rush to have it again. It was his idea, before the first word was written, that Norah Jones just had to play the lead. She had never acted in anything, except maybe a sixth-grade play. It’s a helluva thing for someone with no acting experience to carry a film like that. She’s in virtually every scene. Other people in the film were terrific [laughs].

My Blueberry Nights

Do you think there will be another Scudder book?

I would doubt it. There have been many times over the years when I thought it was probably done, so it’s possible I’m wrong. But Scudder is 75 or 76, something like that, having him age in real time. I think the series has a sense of completion about it.

But you’re still writing other stuff…

I can’t seem to retire.

What is your writing process like?

When I write, and I don’t write often now. Just this year, in May, I was struck out of the blue by an idea for a book. When I thought about it, it came alive. Last month, I went down to Philadelphia, booked myself an apartment (Airbnb is a godsend!), and wrote the book.

So you isolate yourself…

Yeah. I’ve written in writer’s colonies, which work fine for me. But I think I’ve aged out of communal living. And also those you have to book in advance, you can’t really do it on impulse. This way I can, and attend to my meals myself. So it worked very well. I came back with a book, and it’ll come out next summer or fall.

Did you put more of your own life in the Scudder books as the series went along?

I don’t think so. It’s hard to know what one is doing unconsciously. But it seems to me that, with the series as time passes, the character is busy being who he is, and the writer is as well.

Visual artists Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard’s debut feature 20,000 Days on Earth is a dreamlike, contemplative film about the Australian musician, actor, and author Nick Cave. Drawing small inspiration from Godard’s One Plus One (shorn of its radical politics) the film is separated into alternating installments: a day in the life of Nick Cave interspersed with footage of the artist at work, recording and performing his latest record with his band The Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away. The rockumentary component of the film is rather by the book (authored by Pennebaker, Maysles, Scorsese, et al), offering a fascinating look at the band offstage and in concert. The “day in the life” scenes, however, are something else entirely: carefully staged unscripted scenarios in which Cave’s apparent candor is at odds with the vivid cinematography and slick editing. The result is a film that acknowledges the conventions of documentary filmmaking without adhering to the rules.

Forsythe and Pollard have collaborated on a number of projects with Cave in previous years in addition to staging full-scale “reenactments” of epic concerts by David Bowie and The Cramps. Piecing together selections from Cave’s notebooks, they were able to create something that is closer in form to an essay film than a documentary, layering Cave’s patchwork narration over their hypnogogic imagining of the songwriter’s 20,000th day on Earth—or some day at the tail end of his 54th year, to be inexact.

The camera sails peacefully into Cave’s office early on that 20,000th day to reveal him pecking away with two fingers on a manual typewriter. Forsythe and Pollard flood this scene with the dramatic import of a Hollywood film, dressing it up with stately background music and a quick torrent of edits to help illustrate Cave’s voiceover. In his commentary he speaks of his romantic devotion to writing and telling magnificent, violent stories. The whole package of words, images, and sounds appears to set the stage for something grand, presumably Cave’s own story, reimagined for the film. But this anticipation quickly subsides as Cave shifts to ruminating on a different topic and the filmmakers tone down the effects. It’s a brilliant false start, signaling the film’s hybrid nature.

Fancy camerawork and effects mediate our access to Cave’s home life, allowing him to uphold his puckish image. We are left instead to over-consider details that may or may not be part of his act. Does he really go to sleep at night wearing all of those heavy gold necklaces and rings? How can those towering stacks of books in his office possibly stay upright? The filmmakers overindulge our nosiness early on by treating us to a freakish closeup of Cave’s eyeball googling in the bathroom mirror, his contact lens not yet settled into place. Stopping short of X-ray vision, how much closer can you get?

Keeping his strut in stride and his private life under wraps, Cave appears to speak freely in a series of pre-arranged interviews disguised as impromptu conversations. He chats with Ray Winstone and Kylie Minogue while driving aimlessly in his jaguar. He chauffeurs former bandmate Blixa Bargeld around Brighton and finally asks the guitarist why he quit The Bad Seeds, 11 years after the fact. And over an eel lunch, Cave and his hirsute band mate Warren Ellis dissect two of their favorite live shows by Jerry Lee Lewis and Nina Simone, both unhinged, manic performances and probable inspiration for Cave’s own rousing stage antics.

“The truth is boring,” Pollard said at a Berlin press conference for the film, to which Cave might have replied in his trademark baritone: “Amen to that!” Nick Cave lives, he says, for the transformative act of performing. At the Nick Cave Archive (that’s a real thing, shipped from Australia to Brighton for the film shoot) he commandeers a slide show of old concert photos for a rapt audience of rubber-gloved archivists. Under a soft spotlight at a staged therapy session he tells a Freudian psychoanalyst with a James Lipton vibe about the time his father attended one of his concerts in secret. On stage, Cave gyrates in a gold lame suit and throws emphatic gestures like a feral televangelist—preaching to the choir of a flailing, wild-eyed audience.

Forsythe and Pollard have made it clear in interviews that they did not want to muss Cave’s image, and indeed many of the early reviews of the film marvel at how he manages to uphold his lauded cool. As a self-described “front row performer,” Cave is at home in this unusual film, backstroking in the ornate aquarium that Forsythe and Pollard have constructed for him. Being ogled is not an issue, as long as he remains the biggest fish in the tank.

“Details is my middle name, all right?”
—Matthew McConaughey as Willis Newton

“I am the victim—the happy victim—of my environment.”
—Jean Renoir while promoting The Crime of Monsieur Lange in 1936 

Richard Linklater’s first feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (88), is the travelogue of a young man, played by Linklater, riding the rails, hitching, and driving through the southwestern United States. The unnamed protagonist flounders about pleasantly in Austin, visits a friend in Missoula, and hoofs around San Francisco by his lonesome (chatting up strangers, though the conversations can’t be heard, covered by city noise, or waves crashing against rocks at a lighthouse by the bay). Then he returns to Austin, babysits his mother’s dog, and, finally, is given a cassette tape by Daniel Johnston, whom he does not know. During their spontaneous meeting Linklater reveals that the film’s title is written on one of the T-shirts he’s been wearing the whole time: “Old Russian proverb,” he says.

Put another way: it’s impossible to learn to make films unless you just go and make some. A no-budget production shot on Super 8 entirely by Linklater, with the help of a friend recording sound, Learn to Plow is what the director, an autodidact and college dropout, has called his “graduate thesis.” Its loose story of a journey seems inspired by (and comes to close to sharing the philosophy of) Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, with hints of Bernard Queysanne’s 1974 Georges Perec adaptation, Un homme qui dort. Linklater’s film has a similar feel for the sense of confinement in homes and public spaces alike, the driving boredom experienced at a street corner, or by an open window, as days pass with little to do.

But Linklater also celebrates the ease of rapport among friends, as well as the “why not?” of falling into new relationships, of circumstantial encounters with whoever, wherever.  It’s a hang-out movie that, depending on a viewer’s age and stomach for the poetry of wandering and the romanticism of youth, is either a very melancholy work or one invigorated by a decidedly American sense of freedom. It affirms the nature of a country born from restlessness and composed of landscapes that are themselves in flux, open to the interpretations of drifters in search of certainty, stability, meaning, and, from that meaning, a way to live.

Learn to Plow has two modes: the reassuring un-eventfulness of leisure time, and the steady stop-and-start of travel. A dozen or so near-characters dribble into and out of the film as Linklater moves from one place to the next. Little to nothing about their relationships, situations, or personal experiences is explained. The elliptical narrative sends these abstracted people through arrangements of starkly discrete spaces—a hallmark of Southwest sprawl—with only the suggestion of significant events happening off screen and with a general but shaky sense of how much time has passed between scenes (most of which are covered in a single shot). Linklater lets the locations drive his compositions, as with the stairwell that obscures Linklater’s wanderer as he parts with a recent fling, only his hands visible as he touches her shirt in farewell. He focuses attention on his character’s surroundings, and how they affect the placement of their bodies in relation to each other, downplaying their already subdued interactions and non-expressive reactions.

Learn to Plow has less dialogue than any given two minutes of a later Linklater film, but it already shows his confidence and precision in compressing a remarkable depth of social observation and feeling into gestures, body language, the gaps between what is said and what is withheld or can’t be articulated. In one such scene, while waiting for yet another train, Linklater sits next to a young woman smoking a cigarette outside the station. He glances at her, she glances at him, she offers him a drag, he declines, and after an awkward pause they briefly lock eyes. The next shot (which echoes the previous one) shows the young woman and Linklater sitting next to each other now inside the station; she’s asleep in a chair, he writes her a letter we never get to read and leaves it on her bags before walking away. It’s two minutes of on-screen time, total, but in this unexpected encounter, there’s a sense of the swirl of connections and possibilities untold buzzing around us at any given moment—the ineffable loveliness of being a person among people, and having the ability to be present beside them and nowhere, too.

Many of the film’s most compelling relationships are developed through variations from one shot to the next. Where characters stand or move in one shot may be mirrored by the movement in the shot that follows: during the Missoula chapter Linklater brushes his teeth at the top left of frame, the rocky hill beneath him sloping down toward the bottom right. The next shot shows Linklater and a friend crossing from left to right, dipping slightly downward in the middle before settling in the far right corner to observe a distant mountain range. Negative space and traversed areas are given equal consideration to the actions exhibited in those spaces. The slope of the hill in the first shot is echoed by the actors’ trajectory in the second and, combined together, the two shots unify and pronounce the expansiveness of these locations. The flow of the narrative therefore becomes clear in the compositions themselves. It’s a strong, early example of Linklater’s career-long use of structuring principles as the fulcrum of his aesthetic.

These rhyming or contrasting spatial arrangements in Learn to Plow have a conceptual, self-conscious, almost mathematical simplicity. But there’s always an implied acknowledgement of the malaise experienced by people living at a comfortable distance from conventional lifestyles. They’re mostly young men in the process of articulating their wants and needs to themselves—a normal stage of youth told with the weightiness and displeasure of those in the thick of living it.

***

One decade later, Linklater made The Newton Boys, on a budget of $27 million (compared with $3000 for Learn to Plow), still one of his largest productions. It is likewise a film in thrall to the objects, customs, and cultural preoccupations that define a place and time—in this case Texas and the Midwest in the early Twenties. And it’s also a film deeply invested in the decency and confusion of people growing with, helping, and relating to one another, while lacking the undercurrent of alienation in Learn to Plow.

That sensitivity to the everyday comes through in Linklater’s grass-fed and fable-like story of America’s most successful bank and train robbers, the Newtons, who came from a long line of penniless farmers and, in all their years of banditry, never killed a soul. Willis (Matthew McConaughey), Joe (Skeet Ulrich), Jess (Ethan Hawke), and Dock (Vincent D’Onofrio) lived into their seventies and eighties after returning to polite society—just a bunch of good ol’ boys turned folk heroes turned beloved old men of their small town communities.

The film’s governing ideas are its dynamic sense of place and the fleeting nature of wonder. Linklater takes great care to elevate his characters’ reactions to newly acquired wealth, opportunity, and romantic liaisons beyond the level of sentiment or plot point, to make them a core part of the film’s meaning. When Jess and Joe join Willis at the swankiest hotel in Omaha to begin their careers together, Linklater frames the pair within the clear middle panel of a stained-glass window in the hotel lobby. The lobby’s interior is suffused in a soft and pinkish gold light, and as the Newtons savor its opulence, their reaction dovetails with an era’s hopes of upward mobility, dreams of personal fulfillment the two men are now walking around inside of. 

When the Newtons begin their heists, Linklater mostly depicts them as elaborate games of youthful abandon. The “boys” and their fidgety demolitions expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam) embrace knuckleheaded masculine traditions of braggadocio and good-natured tomfoolery. Planning the train job that will get them caught, the Newtons arrange inch-tall plastic soldiers, cowboys, and Indians around a model locomotive to layout their plan, like kids enjoying a train set on Christmas morning. And in different ways, the boys treat family itself as a form of theater, contributing to the film’s affectionate and subtle rendering of familial bonds.

The film’s depiction of the Newtons’ antics is in the service of revealing both character and the social context that shapes it. When McConaughey’s Willis, pleased with himself as always, buys a five-cent Police Gazette (in a tip of the hat to his misdeeds) from a beautiful cigar-stand attendant, it’s an announcement to himself that he’s finally doing what he wants and heading wherever he wishes. He begins wooing that cigar-stand attendant, a single mother named Louise (Julianna Margulies), and when he races her son down the staircase of a movie palace, Linklater cranes the camera back and down as they tear past other patrons. As the camera comes to a rest, and Willis and the boy exit the shot, Linklater pauses for a half-beat on a young girl being lectured by her finger-wagging father.

Linklater’s detail-oriented approach to the period piece is unpretentious and freshly executed, but it’s also dependent on the specific energies of its actors. McConaughey and Hawke brashly root the drama of a given moment in their ability to change the trajectory of scenes by boisterously calling attention to their scheming and playfulness, respectively. Key to the film above all is McConaughey’s Willis. He plays the eldest Newton brother as a bird of prey with an ego instead of bloodthirstiness. Willis is a sweet-talking man on the make with the logistical knowhow of a businessman (which he aspires to be) and the zest for showmanship of a natural self-mythologizer (colored by the impoverished environment of his upbringing). He’s always trying to persuade, his laser-focused eyes affixing on any and every chance for personal gain, scanning rooms for someone to charm, ingratiate himself to, and blindside with that smile which fills his face as quick as a huckster’s.

And yet Willis is genuine in his beliefs, reactive to and amazed by the possibilities and commotion that surround him—all he needs is a moment, a glance returned. He’s a lusty man bolting for penthouse heights of elegance in every aspect of life, with a connoisseur’s enjoyment for it. In Willis, Linklater and McConaughey achieve the portrait of a man hungry to the point of anger for those splendors promised him by his birthright as an American.

This week, 30-year-old Anthony Chen’s quiet domestic drama, Ilo Ilo, arrives on DVD in the U.S. from boutique label, Film Movement. It’s a sign of how much the foreign film landscape has changed since Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (00), which mined similar territory, got a 15 screen theatrical release in the U.S., earning over $1 million; 15 years later, Ilo Ilo hit four screens and barely made it past the $50,000 mark. Quality no longer has a role in a film’s distribution chances, because there simply is no more theatrical market for subtitled films in America. But the fact that this flick barely registered theatrically and will reach a far bigger audience on DVD shouldn’t keep you away. Ilo Ilo is the first Singaporean feature film to win a prize at Cannes (the Camera d’Or), and it quickly picked up 25 other awards at film festivals around the world, including two prestigious Taipei Golden Horse awards for “Best New Director” and “Best Screenplay.”

The Lim family are middle class Singaporeans with dad, Teck (Chen Tian-wen), trying to hold onto his job during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, while heavily pregnant mom, Hwee Leng (Yeo Yann-yann), holds down a second job of her own. Lost in the salary-shuffle is their son, Jiale (Koh Jia-ler), a bratty little emperor with an overbite who acts out on an epic level. Hwee Leng and Teck hire a Filipino maid, Terry (Angeli Bayani), for help and the movie watches from a slight remove as the family falls apart, and Terry tries to reach the helplessly drifting Jiale and bring him back to shore.

Based on Anthony Chen’s own childhood (he spent weeks searching for a location that exactly matched the layout of his family’s old apartment), Ilo Ilo is shot with zero flashy camera work and no musical score. But Chen’s film is more than an artsy map of the tiny cruelties that families inflict on one another, the little diplomacies, the petty slights, and the microscopic revenges. Underneath its deceptively simple surface, it’s packed to the point of exploding with racial and class tension. 

But Chen’s refusal to turn these issues into melodrama has resulted in reviews that miss the point. The Hollywood Reporter writes, “…faint praise is probably the most honest response to a low-key exercise in domestic navel-gazing that blurs the line between subtle understatement and tasteful tedium.” Variety gets closer, but still wins no cigar, when it writes, “The film’s Chinese title, which translates as ‘Mom and Dad Are Not Home,’ describes the predicament of so many Asian children who are placed in the care of foreign nannies while their parents work to maintain a double-income lifestyle.” 

Let me fix that for Variety: “The film describes the predicament of so many Chinese children who are placed in the care of Filipino and Indonesian nannies.” Out of the 53 million domestic workers in the world, the majority of them (41 percent) work in Asia. Hong Kong alone has 319,325 (4.4 percent of the total population), while Singapore has 211,000. Most of these workers get one day off per week (a concession not required in Singapore until 2013), and Amensty International reports that at least a third of them work around 17 hours per day. Since 1998, Hong Kong’s average median monthly income has risen 15 percent. For domestic workers (often called amahs) it has risen 3.9 percent. In real numbers that means amahs like Terry earn USD $510 a month in Hong Kong, $316 a month in Singapore, and, in Malaysia, only $121 a month.

But the ugliest thing about this situation is that domestic workers are usually from a country considered ethnically inferior by their employers. 48 percent of domestic workers in Hong Kong are Filipino, and 49 percent are from Indonesia. They’re often darker skinned than the Chinese families they work for, they’re often made to wear uniforms, and many of them have to share rooms with the children, or live in the laundry room. Abuse is a common problem. Jacky Cheung, Hong Kong’s famous actor and singer who has appeared in everything from Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By (88) to blockbuster Bodyguards and Assassins (09), was blacklisted by the government of the Philippines, for tearing through 21 domestic workers in three years. Cheung’s solution? Hire Indonesian maids instead. 

Generations of kids in Asia’s biggest cities grow up being taught by example that Filipinos and Indonesians are their inferiors, born to serve. In the Hong Kong movie Legendary Couple (95), a cop chases a suspect into Central on a Sunday afternoon. For years, Central is where thousands of Filipino maids gathered on Sundays, their one day off, to cut hair, hang out, hold church services, trade news from home, and generally relax. It is wall to wall domestic workers, yet the scene in Legendary Couple required the cop to accidentally kill an innocent bystander. So the cop fires into a crowd of domestic workers and his bullet somehow hits a lone Chinese schoolgirl hiding in their midst because the producers were fully aware that Hong Kong audiences could care less about a dead Filipino. 

Having a strange woman move into your home to take care of your children is fraught with anxiety. Add in racial and religious tensions (most domestic workers are Christian or Muslim, most Chinese are neither) and you’ve got a powder keg. In Ilo Ilo (named after the province in the Philippines where Terry comes from), you’ve got added economic tension as the Lim family loses their grip on the economic ladder. Employing Terry becomes a status symbol they cling to, but also a reminder that all that separates her from them is ethnic difference and income. As their income dwindles to nothing, what’s left?

The Hollywood Reporter writes that “…there is too little dramatic spark here to attract overseas audiences,” but for me, every scene is loaded with tensions simmering just beneath the surface. Chen doesn’t beat audiences over the head with them, but the subtext is loaded, from the unfair treatment of domestic workers by the police to the shadow economy of second jobs they hold (illegally) and how some of them resort to extreme measures, including drugging their employers, to earn extra income. Played casually, moments when Hwee Leng confiscates Terry’s passport, or when Terry says grace at the table, hint at unspoken tensions.

It’s not all bleak and horrible, however. Domestic workers across Asia have started speaking out, demanding better treatment and working conditions. And Ilo Ilo shows that relations between the families and the domestic workers aren’t solely determined by race and class. When petulant Jiale gives Terry a grudging “Sorry” it’s like Dolly Parton singing “And I Will Always Love You,” and when Terry, who, like many domestic workers, left her own child to earn money taking care of someone else’s, refers to Jiale as “my boy” it’s the kind of emotional mountaintop Rocky achieves with “Adrian! Adriannnn!!!” 

The relationship between domestic workers and the families who employ them are two-way streets, a fact that Ilo Ilo is careful to show, mostly because Chen knows this firsthand. He and his brothers were raised by an amah until they were 12. They lost touch when she moved back to the Philippines (to Ilo Ilo, actually), but when his movie was released, the Filipino media picked up the story and the woman his family knew as Aunt Terry got in touch. Chen and his brother went to the Philippines to see her, a trip that he describes in an interview.

“She kept such strong memories of us because she didn't have children,” he says. “In fact, she had a blue pouch she wears everywhere she goes, and she told us that my mum gave it to her, like, 17 years ago. When she opened it, inside were photographs of me and my brothers. That really moved us to tears.”

The issue of domestic workers in Asia is a complicated tangle of interpersonal dynamics, racial tensions, and class issues. Then again, from a child’s point of view it’s not very complicated at all. Sometimes, someone shows up and gives you the kindness and attention you need. Maybe they’re Chinese, maybe they’re Filipino, maybe they’re Indonesian. Kids don’t care. Whoever it is, they’re family.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

…The big news out of Hong Kong is that everyone has decided it’s okay to reveal the city’s best-kept secret: no one likes comedian Stephen Chow. As Chow auditions actresses for his new movie, Mermaids, a website called Art Western District published a 50,000 word article titled, “Why So Many People Hate Stephen Chow Sing Chi?” Rather than a takedown, it was a long history of his career, featuring many never-before-seen photos from his childhood. It also contained a factoid that has made the rounds many times in the past: that Stephen Chow was denied entry into Canada in 1993 and 1996 because he had worked closely with the head of China Star, Charles Heung, a man authorities consider “mob connected.” Heung’s father was one of the founders of the Sun Yee On triad, which reportedly caused Heung’s own visa to Canada to be denied in 1995, even though no one thinks that Mr. Heung has anything to do with triads anymore. In fact, it’s generally believed that he left the triads far behind to  become one of the most powerful men in Hong Kong film. 

Heung’s wife, Tiffany Chen, was furious when she saw the article. “This online article truly is too harmful to my husband, so I have to come out and protect him,” she said. “This article is like his personal autobiography. Some of the childhood photos even the media may not have. Can a fan have so much information? I am only erupting after years of holding back.” And erupt she did, claiming that Chow was a spoiled, soulless ingrate with a high salary and no sense of respect. As she cut loose, other film industry players decided it was open season on Chow and unleashed the beast. Manager and actor Tin Kai-man accused him of being a cheapskate. Johnnie To, who has directed Chow, said, “I admire his talent, but not him as an individual.” Director Wong Jing said, “There are no more words left to describe Stephen Chow. He has been scolded endlessly. I don’t want to scold him from a new angle.” Co-star Andy Lau played it safe, trying to dispel rumors, and, when asked point-blank if they were friends, said, “I really don't dare to say, I don't know." Chow’s girlfriend of 13 years, Alice Lo, filed suit against him last year, which doesn’t help matters.

…As the big film festivals like Venice and Toronto wind down, lots and lots of Asian movies played for Western audiences for the first time, and lots of reviewers filed their impressions. Here’s a round-up of the big ones:

Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom.

Bong Joon-ho-produced maritime disaster movie Haemoo.

No one seemed to like Andrew Lau’s Martin Scorsese-produced Chinatown gangland tale, Revenge of the Green Dragons, unfortunately.

Im Kwon-Taek’s Reverie.

The latest arthouse mystery from China, Red Amnesia.

Ann Hui’s glitzy biopic The Golden Era.

South Korea’s up-with-people retail riff on Silkwood, Cart.

Japan’s master director, Tetsuya Nakashima’s latest, World of Kanako, starring Koji Yakusho. 

And for another point of view, the Japan Times weighs in.

It’s also become a scandalous success in Japan.

Sion Sono’s crazy-town rap musical Tokyo Tribes.

The first sere leaf has touched the pavement, and the NFL season has begun anew. What this means, for practical purposes, is that from now until the beginning of February next year, I will willingly and repeatedly expose myself to some of the most horrible audio-visual stimuli known to humankind. On broadcasts of FOX NFL Sunday, I will be treated to the antics of “Cleatus the FOX Sports Robot.”¹ At each of the innumerable commercial breaks that I will sit through over the next few months, Denis Leary will challenge my masculinity in an attempt to harangue me into purchasing an extended cab Ford F-150. At the end of the season, in all likelihood after my Cincinnati Bengals have made their trademark Marvin Lewis era one-and-done playoff appearance, I can witness the gruesome imposition of narratives meant to “humanize” the incoming Super Bowl teams, i.e. the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Jerome Bettis “coming home” to Detroit in 2005, or the tearful farewell tour of the Baltimore Ravens’ murderer-turned-fervent-Christian Ray Lewis in the 2012-13 season.

To this aesthetic displeasure, we can add the moral compromise that comes of supporting an indefensible bloodsport steeped in human misery. The primary emergent narratives of this young season have surrounded Raven Ray Rice and, now, Viking Adrian Peterson, both involved in off-the-field incidents of violence involving loved ones far smaller and less equipped for self-defense than themselves.² These aren’t narratives of the sort encouraged by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and his organization, and he has shamed himself in his response or lack thereof to them. Each fresh horror story involving football players joins a dossier of evidence against the game, part a larger debate which has been ongoing at least since the year 1909, when 33 human beings perished as a result of playing football—for as long as America has been fascinated by football, it has in part at least been horrified by its fascination. The hanging question is this: are Rice and Peterson just bad eggs who spoil the bunch, their ostracism thus freeing the NFL to return to its role as an organization that encourages lofty and beautiful sentiments in both players and fans, or are their actions indicative of something endemic to the game itself, which reflects the worst, most belligerent aspects of our national character?

Men, Women, & Children

The latter is a fairly common assumption in movies dealing in an explicit and important manner with American Life. I recently returned from the Toronto International Film Festival, where my last screening before emplaning was Jason Reitman’s Men, Women, & Children. One of the film’s ensemble is Tim Mooney (Ansel Elgort), a breakout star running back on his high school football team who decides not to play sophomore year, still suffering from the emotional trauma of his mother having abandoned his father and him for California. Reitman’s film is set somewhere in the vicinity of Austin, Texas, a state where high school football is king. (There is nothing in the movie to suggest that Reitman has ever set foot in Texas but, disconcertingly, it appears that the film was actually shot there.) The setting invites the memory of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, which also features a football-averse young man growing up in the Lone Star State. (The comparison is nowhere else warranted by Reitman’s movie, which is startlingly awful even by his standards.) And while the dialogue of Ellar Coltrane’s Mason in Boyhood isn’t necessarily the dialogue of the movie, Reitman drops a clear sign that he’s totally “OMG fuck teh jocks” into his mise-en-scene, such as it is. Habitually harassed as a quitter for letting down the team, Mooney finally snaps and beats a classmate into a bloody pulp in the cafeteria, in a scene whose sickening, thudding detail curiously echoes the school hall beatdown in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005). Mooney is sent to the school counselor’s office, which is conspicuously decorated with a poster bearing Vince Lombardi’s famous motto “Winning Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing.”

Unlike Mason, Linklater was a high school athlete—a backup quarterback for the Huntsville High School Hornets from 1976 to 1978, and after that a standout baseball star at Houston Bellaire. The uneasy coexistence of team sports ethos—“Winning Isn’t Everything” and so on— and nonconformist ideals which Linklater would’ve been exposed to during these years is key to his 1993 Dazed and Confused. The film’s ensemble of characters includes Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), a football star who must decide whether to sign a pledge which attests that he won’t do drugs over the summer; like University of Texas and Miami Dolphins great Ricky Williams, Randall faces a Sophie’s Choice between smoking weed and football. Linklater has long spoken of his desire to make a film about high school football in Texas, and in the late Nineties he was in the running to direct Friday Night Lights, based on a non-fiction book written by H.G. Bissinger which follows a West Texas HS team’s 1988 season. “It’s a safer bet to make a moronic movie than one that’s real,” Linklater says, frustrated, in a 1998 Texas Monthly profile—and sure enough, Friday Night Lights finally came to the screen in 2004, directed by the awe-strikingly-pandering actor-turned-director Peter Berg, who also developed the NBC television series (2006-2011) of the same name.

Berg’s blood-and-thunder movie is a trial run for his 2013 Lone Survivor, another paean to manly masochism, with his Permian High School Panthers absorbing bone-splintering hits after every snap, and hacking up buckets of red, red kroovy in-between. Friday Night Lights belongs to a cycle of football movies released in the early years of the 21st century, beginning with Remember the Titans (2000) and carrying through We Are Marshall (2006), Invincible (2006), The Express (2008), The Blind Side (2009), and this year’s When the Game Stands Tall. Dealing in every level of play from high school to the pros, these are films in which the gridiron is transformed into a sort of moral proving ground, a space in which racial prejudice, economic imbalance, self-doubt, or some combination thereof can be confronted and triumphed over, either on the scoreboard or in moral victory, generally under the oversight of a sage coach. (Billy Bob Thornton handles the part in Friday Night Lights.)

Friday Night Lights

I’d like to believe that Coach Linklater would’ve done some different play-calling. At the risk of generalizing, what one discerns of Linklater through his films is the image of someone who cherishes sport for sport’s sake, while distrusting those who would impose value systems—usually crypto-conservative—onto a game which is already complete unto itself. Linklater is an inheritor of the legacy of what I will broadly call the counterculture sports movie, even having filmed a cover version of one of the canonical texts of the subgenre, his 2005 remake of Michael Ritchie’s 1976 The Bad News Bears. Like Berg in Friday Night Lights, Linklater uses Thornton as his coach figure, but towards very different ends—his alcoholic Morris Buttermaker in Bears is a flawed, faded patriarch, as much in need of correction as the kids he’s coaching. (As of this writing, Linklater has a spiritual sequel to Dazed in the works, the early ‘80s-set That’s What I’m Talking About, which centers on hard-partying college-age baseball players.)

The counterculture sports movie rejects the causal relationship between sports and character-building. The game is an end unto itself, useless and nevertheless beautiful—or perhaps beautiful because it’s useless. It allows figures who in actual life would be considered losers a shot at glory. And at worst, it offers a counter-myth as spurious as the mainstream sports movie’s myth, as in an edifice of soaring clichés like The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a 2014 documentary which aired as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 series about the Portland Mavericks, a Minor League baseball team which existed from 1973 to 1977, whose primary distinction was a lack of affiliation with any Major League franchise.

1979’s North Dallas Forty is perhaps the archetypal example of the counterculture football movie: Respectful of the sport but deeply distrusting of the institutions and bureaucracy that surround it, with more than a slight pall of existential crisis hanging over the whole affair. It is based on a 1973 novel of the same name by Peter Gent, a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys who, after racking up 989 career yards between 1964 and ‘68, became a man of letters. The book is a roman à clef expose of Gent’s unhappy pro stint, with the fictional North Dallas Bulls standing in for the Cowboys. Nick Nolte, who’d knocked around between various college football teams before turning to theatre, plays banged-up wideout Phil Elliott—the Gent stand-in. Singer-songwriter Mac Davis—he wrote “In the Ghetto” for Elvis—is quarterback Seth Maxwell, based on Gent’s teammate and friend Don Meredith. The film was directed by Ted Kotcheff, a peripatetic Toronto-born director who has recently enjoyed a raised profile thanks to the re-release of his 1971 Wake in Fright, an extended, shambolic, bleary, drunken nightmare set in the Australian outback. Kotcheff’s North Dallas Forty has the same interest in self-destructive masculine ritual as that earlier film. Here, this anarchy is essential to the functioning of the players, almost bohemian in their reckless pursuit of inspirational ecstasies, while their coach (G.D. Spradlin) is an unimaginative businessman who attempts to reduce the game to crunchable numbers. (The real-life inspiration is Coach Tom Landry, who oversaw the Cowboys during the period in which they began to be marketed as “America’s Team.”) The film is defined by this tension between commerce (managing) and art (playing), which snaps when one player (Oakland Raiders³ DE John “Tooz” Matsuzak) finally erupts at a coach in the locker room. This is shortly before Elliott himself walks away from the professional game, quoting an epistle of St. Paul on his way out the door: “It’s time to put away childish things.”

North Dallas Forty

As a 33-year-old vocational film critic, putting aside things deemed childish is hardly an option—and we do need games to brighten our path through this vale of tears. It was in this spirit that, undoubtedly in a fit of Internet procrastination, I started kicking around the idea of an all-auteur football team with some other movie chat folks, who were also probably putting off actual work.⁴ For the purposes of the conversation, “auteur” was taken to mean “anyone who has ever directed a feature-length movie,” and any solid biographical evidence of participation in the sport at any level was taken as qualification for the team. Under these rules, John Wayne, an offensive tackle with the “Thundering Herd” of the University of Southern California and director of The Alamo (1960) counts, as does Tommy Lee Jones, director of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and offensive guard on the undefeated 1968 Harvard squad. The five episodes of Hunter that Fred Dreyer directed wouldn’t get him aboard, but he squeaks onto the team thanks to his 2000 feature Highway 395.

Putting together such a team, you immediately feel the presence of the historical and ongoing racism of the American picture business. (While identified with liberal values as frequently as football is identified with conservative ones, Hollywood has to date failed to integrate nearly as successfully.) Paul Robeson, a star at Rutgers some decades before Rice, doesn’t have a directorial credit. Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, a superstar defensive back for both the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs of the AFL, is the most obvious and amply qualified African-American candidate—the last of his 21 completed films is 2007’s Vegas Vampires. As much as I would like to, however, I don’t think I can in good conscience bring Jim Brown aboard on the strength of the 1999 TV movie that he directed, Keeping the Music Alive.

Elsewhere, we filled positions with names more associated with accomplishments behind the camera than on the field. At tackle we had John Ford, known as “Bull Feeney the Human Battering Ram” in the days when he helped the Portland High School team win two state championships and was twice named to the Maine all-state football team, and Terrence Malick, of the 1961 St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Spartans. Burt Reynolds seemed for a moment like the second coming of Clint Eastwood with his 1976 directorial debut Gator, but before this he was a Seminole—a star running back at Florida State.⁵ The wide receiver corps that we came up with was probably the smallest in the history of the sport, including John Cassavetes (Port Washington High School), Sam Peckinpah (Fresno High School), and Woody Allen (No real qualification, but I remember that he broke his nose playing football as a kid.) In order to add some size, high school quarterback William Wellman was converted to tight end to play the role of bulldog in-line blocker. Though the quarterback is not-infrequently referred to as the “director” of the game, Linklater would appear, ironically, to have little competition for the QB slot outside of Wellman. Warren Beatty, whose breakout role was that of aristocratic high school quarterback Milton Armitage in the sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” and who played a backup QB for the Los Angeles Rams in 1978’s Heaven Can Wait, which he co-directed with Buck Henry, always coveted the slot, but in actual fact he’d been a second team, all-county center and linebacker at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia. Also on offense is Martin Ritt, second-string halfback for “The Fighting Christians” of North Carolina’s Elon University, where he was appalled to witness southern racism firsthand. Upon returning to New York, Ritt earned $15 a game playing professionally for the City Island Slickers, when he wasn’t otherwise engaged with the leftist Theater of Action organization. We know that Allan Dwan, Budd Boetticher, John Sayles, and John Sturges all got in some college ball, as did Robert “Le Gros Bob” Aldrich, who lettered at the University of Virginia. The degree of enthusiasm with which my colleagues and I participated in this game, I’m afraid, suggests that there is much to the argument for auteurdom as a species of boyish fandom.

Despite their difference in age, Aldrich and Reynolds actually would become teammates of a sort, briefly setting up the production company “Roburt” together. The first and last Roburt production is Aldrich’s 1975 Hustle, which was allowed for by the enormous popular success of their previous film, 1974’s The Longest Yard, for my money the greatest football movie ever made. Reynolds plays Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a retired NFL quarterback who, as the film begins, has been reduced to a washed-up drunken lout, seen casually brutalizing the wealthy woman that he lives with and sponges off of—it’s no Ray Rice KO, but it’s not so far from it—then taking off in her Citroen sports car and leading the police on a Hal Needham car chase. Finally caught, Crewe is sentenced to 18 months in Citrus State Prison, whose Warden Hazen (Eddie Albert) happens to be a big football fan. Hazen fields a semi-professional team made up of guards, first-ranked in the Southeastern league, and has pulled strings to get Crewe under his control. Using bullying tactics, Hazen forces a reluctant Crewe to assemble a team of convicts to play a “tune-up game” against the guards, in which Crewe himself is to play quarterback. (Elements of the plot appear in Walter Hill’s 2002 Undisputed, one of the last great boxing pictures, and one of the few which doesn’t in any way rely on Great White Hope mythology.)

Hazen demands that the game have a moral dimension, one which reasserts the (law-and-)order of his worldview, where victory is a direct result of righteousness—this tautology comes naturally to a man who must believe that everyone in his prison must necessarily be guilty, because otherwise they wouldn’t be there. He is in the practice of having an assistant record his own sagacious pronouncements about football, strings of Lombardi-esque platitudes like “Young people can learn a great deal from a skillfully-played football game—offense, defense. The spirit of achievement. Teamwork. You might say the game embodies what has made our country great. It’s a great game. It’s played by great men.”⁶ Crewe rejects such impositions of sentiment onto football—at one point he spins a sappy yarn about his backstory for a cellblock pal, only to laugh the whole thing off a moment later. During the final game, the announcer comments that “it looks more like a prayer meeting” as Crewe calls his team in for a huddle, but he’s not one for speechifying. “Let’s do it,” is all he says.

The Longest Yard

Crewe assembles his team—their number includes the ogre-ish Richard Kiel, who passed on last week—by inducing inmates with the promise of revenge against their jailers. His bruisers call themselves the Mean Machine, and they play to cripple and maim. The big tune-up game occupies slightly more than the last third of the movie from the moment of the first snap. Presenting this final confrontation, Aldrich uses multiple images which glide across the frame at once to interlock before breaking apart again—the phrase “split-screen” is hardly sufficient for this network of sliding picture panes—a process he will develop still further in his 1977 Twilight’s Last Gleaming (discussed here). These effects taper off as the game wears on, however, and Aldrich sets aside the directorial razzle-dazzle to straightforwardly document play in action. Shortly after the Mean Machine score three points on an antique “Drop kick” call, Aldrich follows an entire play with a single camera movement, shot from an angle slightly above the level of the field. Reynolds (or some reasonable uniformed facsimile thereof) takes the snap, drops back under pressure from a blitzing linebacker (Ray Nitschke, formerly of the Green Bay Packers), pump fakes to his right side, gets off a screen pass on the left to his RB (Pervis Atkins, Jr., who spent time with the Rams, Redskins, and Raiders), who cuts back to evade two defenders, bounces off another, hurtles over a falling blocker, runs headlong into a member of the secondary, and manages to fall forward, rumbling downfield for something like forty yards altogether. A shot like this is inestimably more difficult to handle that the visceral in-the-scrum immediacy which allows mediocre filmmakers like Berg to hide their inadequacy—I was amused to watch a swath of blood disappear and reappear on the quarterback’s jersey during Friday Night Lights’ State Championship game.

With its superstars and backups, its endless rehearsals for the big show, the football movie has much in common with the backstage musical, though given the sport’s macho associations, it is more commonly compared to its other near-neighbor, the war film. “I want it to be like The Seven Samurai,” Linklater is quoted as saying of his never-to-be-made Friday Night Lights. Among the dirty plays that the Mean Machine call in the huddle is “4-3 Mau Mau”—the reference to the native Mau Mau Uprising against colonial British rulers in Kenya is significant, for it is among Crewe’s accomplishments to convince black inmates onto the team to compete against the all-white guards. In Alain Silver and James Ursini’s What Ever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, discussion of The Longest Yard is relegated to a section called “The Battle and the Game,” which discusses Aldrich’s sports films alongside his war films. “In many screenings,” write Silver and Ursini, “audiences not only cheered for the convicts as they would a real team but screamed for the guards’ blood.”

Not so Nora Sayre in the New York Times, who does accede in her down-the-nose review that “Though The Yard is a terrible picture, I’ll admit to having unwillingly enjoyed some of the football practice and parts of the final game... There’s no thrill in the sport, since it’s the movie director who decides who wins or loses.” This, of course, is an alarmingly meaningless statement, even for the Times—a movie director (or scriptwriter, or studio) decides who lives or dies in any given picture as well, and if known outcomes couldn’t make for thrilling viewing, we would never return to movies at all, or watch highlights from games already played. I have watched The Longest Yard more times than I ought to say, and the first time that Crewe connects downfield, I never fail to let loose with a whoop of pleasure, similar in type if not in volume to that elicited by Andy Dalton’s 77-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Green in Week One. It is such endorphin-dump moments as this that make it quite impossible to put aside this particular childish thing, this Theater of Action, as morally compromised and strewn with human wreckage as the movies themselves.

1.From the Cleatus wiki:” “Cleatus mainly appears during the intro sequence of the show as well as brief commercials for movies and TV shows. In these commercials he commonly gets attacked by a CGI character from whatever the advertisement is about. He has thus far been attacked by Iron Man, a dragon from the movie Eragon, and a T-1000 robot from the TV show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and taunted with thrown objects by The Burger King. Cleatus is also known to hop on two feet, play the electric guitar, shake out his limbs, and dance using such moves as the swim and the electric slide; he Tebowed during the December 11, 2011 Fox broadcast of a Denver Broncos game. Games on the weekend following New Year's Day show Cleatus sitting on a bench holding an ice pack to his head, nursing a hangover. When the MLB postseason begins on Fox in October, he will also take baseballs from a basket and hit them with a bat towards the background of the screen. After the World Series is over, he will not do this again until the next year's postseason begins.

If a Thanksgiving NFL game is on Fox, he is usually replaced with a robot turkey.”

2.Peterson answered a warrant for his arrest in Texas this Saturday, charged with negligent injury to a child after disciplining his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. Rice was captured by surveillance cameras at the Revel Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City knocking out his then-fiancée Janay Palmer on February 15 of this year. Commissioner Goodell handed down a two-game suspension for this infraction after video of Rice dragging around a limp and unconscious Palmer like fresh game appeared on the website TMZ. After yet another video “leaked” to the public, in which Rice’s blow can be seen connecting, his contract was terminated by the Ravens, who of course could have seen the damning footage at any time. He was abandoned by his last remaining sponsor, Nike, and EA Sports eliminated him from Madden ’15.  

The emergence of this physical evidence, of course, materially changed nothing about the nature of Rice’s transgression—given that we’ve already seen him dragging an unconscious woman around, we can reasonably surmise that she was dealt a whopping blow at some point in the very recent past, probably by the man who is rag-dolling her body around. (For further reading, I recommend Drew Magary’s Deadspin piece on the subject, “Here’s Why the NFL is Full of Shit.”) Such is the power of the image.

3.The Raiders, a bunch of infamous ne’er-do-wells, were the most counterculture-identified team of the Seventies. In Arthur Penn’s 1975 Night Moves, it is perhaps significant that Gene Hackman’s private dick Harry Moseby is an ex-Raider. When Moseby’s wife asks “Who’s winning?” of the game he’s watching, he offers an existentialist rebuff by way of scriptwriter Alan Sharp. “Nobody,” he says. “One side’s just losing slower than the other.” (I have quoted this irresistible passage before in writing about another Sharp script, this for Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid). The search to restore lost purpose to play is seen in Tooz’s locker room meltdown (“When we’re dead-tired in the fourth quarter, winning’s gotta mean more than just money”), and parodied in a recent Onion News Network skit: “Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life.”

4.Participants, as best I can recall, included Bilge Ebiri, R. Emmet Sweeney, Eric Hynes, Victor Morton, Justin Stewart, and Brendan Bouzard.

5.The Tampa Bay Bandits, one of the 18 teams who played in the short-lived (1983-1986) United States Football League, were named after Reynolds’s Smokey and the Bandit films—Reynolds was a general partner and minority owner of the team. The USFL, which played a spring/summer schedule, was one of several organizations to unsuccessfully challenge the NFL’s monopoly on professional football—as Roburt was one of Aldrich’s many attempts to secure his independence from Hollywood.

6. With his omnipresent tape recorder, Hazen uncannily recalls another football fan obsessed with self-documentation, Richard Nixon, who, so debunked legend has it, called an unsuccessful reverse play for the Redskins during a 1971 playoff game against San Francisco. Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974. The Longest Yard was released on August 30. Remembering Philip Baker Hall’s Nixon blubbering over the memory of his Whittier College football coach in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor (1984), I can only imagine that the 37th president would’ve loved the mawkish coach-porn movies of recent years.

Matthew Warchus’s Pride isn’t actually a musical, but it belongs to a strain of British films that I think of as “nearly political musicals.” That is, they’re nearly musicals—and if you wanted to be disparaging, you could write them off as nearly political. I’m thinking of 1996’s Brassed Off and 2000’s Billy Elliot (both set against the background of the 1984-85 U.K. miners’ strike), 1997’s The Full Monty (about redundant steelworkers), and 2010’s Made in Dagenham (women workers for equal pay at Ford in the Sixties). These all tell British working-class stories and use a populist feel-good approach, and lashings of music, to sugar the pill of their political content. But then, that perhaps reflects the way that in the U.K. until fairly recently, pop music was a genuine social glue.

You could regard them as “jukebox Loach”—and Ken Loach’s own work, since the Nineties, has tended to be similarly schematic in its insistence on conveying an upbeat message. Not surprisingly, several of these movies have spawned cheerful, big-night-out stage shows: after the hugely successful Billy Elliot the Musical, The Full Monty became a live hen-night staple of London’s West End, while a musical Made in Dagenham premieres soon in London, with Gemma Arterton in the lead.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Pride yielded a similar spin-off before too long; indeed, Warchus has his own formidable stage musical chops, having directed the massively successful Matilda. The cheerfully functional Pride isn’t that stimulating as a piece of cinema, though thankfully it’s livelier than Warchus’s clunky Sam Shepard adaptation Simpatico (99). Still, it’s an entirely laudable piece of work, and—regrettably—a striking anomaly given the current stultified, divisive, and reactionary state of British political culture.  

Pride is another story of the miners’ strike—an episode in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, having announced widespread pit closures, waged a punitive war on the National Union of Miners (and beyond it, on Britain’s unions in general), in the process destroying not only Britain’s coal industry and wrecking the livelihood of many communities, as well as contributing hugely to the long-term demoralization of the British left. Even so, although the strike ended in bitter defeat for the miners, an important aspect of it was that it mobilized, however briefly, a powerful sense of left-wing solidarity. That’s what Pride is about. Written by playwright Stephen Beresford and dramatizing the story of several real-life characters, the film covers the activities of a group named Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) and its coming together with a mining community in South Wales’ Dulais Valley. The group mustered support for the miners, raised funds, and just as importantly, says the film, built bridges between communities that you might not have expected to have much in common.

Pride focuses on the LGSM organizers, a small committed group based at the Gay’s the Word bookshop in central London: among them, impassioned young activist Mark (Ben Schnetzer)—based on the late Mark Ashton—and a novice in the gay community, shy, closeted young suburbanite Joe (George Mackay). Joe is a little too obviously pitched as our non-threatening entrée into the world of gay activism: cautiously turning up at a Gay Pride rally, he demurs about holding up a banner he’s passed (“I don’t want to be too visible”) only to find that it reads: “Queers—Better Blatant Than Latent.” A bewildered Joe finds himself surrounded by radicals and eccentrics, from militant lesbian Stella (Karina Fernandez) to the LGSM’s resident old-school theatrical type Jonathan (Dominic West); but the character’s cheerful, fascinated blandness will carry through mainstream viewers who might be resistant to either the film’s sexual or left-wing politics.  

In fact, conservative resistance and conquering it are what the film is substantially about. Contacting the beleaguered mining community of Onllwyn, the group invites union organizer Dai Donovan (Paddy Considine) to London to inaugurate dialogue. They take him to a gay club, where no one is interested at first, but then Dai gives a cheerful, jokey address—“There’s only one difference between here and a pub in South Wales—the women,” he says, looking over at a drag queen. “They’re a lot more feminine in here.” When Dai invites the LGSM to Onllwyn, they’re confronted by a range of responses—bafflement, suspicion, downright homophobia. Just as Margaret Thatcher notoriously called the striking miners Britain’s “enemy within,” the village has its own malevolent “enemy within”—scowling matriarch Maureen  (Lisa Palfrey), who’s committed to the strike, but doesn’t want the support of “perverts.” Glaring out of her window from between heavy curtains, she betrays the gay-miners alliance to the reactionary tabloid press—her collabo status underlined by a Nazi helmet of a hairdo.

There are nevertheless welcoming faces in Onllwyn, including a shy, dour, elderly union stalwart (Bill Nighy, in peerless form), doughty, plain-talking middle-aged Hefina (Imelda Staunton), and her younger counterpart Siân (Jessica Gunning), who is liberated by the newcomers and their indomitable spirit (an end title reveals that the real-life Siân James went on to further her education and become a Labour Member of Parliament).

Everyone learns something here. The miners teach the gays to stick to their guns and be themselves. One Welsh character quietly confesses that he’s gay, but in an inventive twist, the film’s real coming-out episode has a gay Londoner embracing his own Welshness: Gethin (Andrew Scott), who has shunned his background because of his religious mother’s rejection, but who returns home, confronts her and properly joins the Welsh cause.

Conversely, the LGSM visitors liberate the Welsh in different ways. Put-upon wives stand up to their husbands; a woman, who always thought that sexual pleasure was just for the blokes, plants a kiss on visiting lesbian Steph (Faye Marsay); and, yes, the village learns to dance. Jonathan does some snazzy moves to “Shame Shame Shame” at the local Labour club, to everyone’s amazement—as Welsh men apparently don’t dance, or didn’t in the Eighties. Instantly, two of the burliest lads in town ask Jonathan to teach them some steps—at last, a way to impress women!

There’s plenty of culture clash jollity of this sort—notably a visit to London, where the matrons hoot with delight at the boys’ dildo and porn mags (“Jesus God, that takes me back,” Hefina enthuses over a hunky centerfold) and refuse to be turned away from a men-only club (“Don’t be daft, we’ve come all the way from Powys!”), ensuring Pride’s cheerful naughty-but-nice factor.

In many ways, Pride effectively is a musical: in one shamelessly tear-jerking scene, Mark stands to give an impassioned address, and the massed women of Onllwyn surge into a chorus of “Bread and Roses.” Much of the dialogue has a distinct “Let’s put on a show right here” ring: when the group needs a photographer, Joe chirps, “I could do it—I’ve got a camera!” There’s a gauche, artless Summer Holiday enthusiasm to it all—although you suspect that it’s probably anything but artless.

Pride alludes to, but doesn’t directly depict the reality of police brutality during the strike—something that was graphically shown in the otherwise more conservative Billy Elliot. But the film doesn’t stint on harsh reality in other respects. We get a strong sense of the virulent homophobia that was acceptable in British daily life and media back then, and the coming into public consciousness of AIDS—represented here by an airing of the “Dies Irae” TV ad that startled the UK into awareness (although it wasn’t actually screened until 1986, after this story ends). The advent of AIDS is poignantly evoked in the film’s subtlest scene, Mark’s brief encounter with a former lover (a muted, to-the-point Russell Tovey), who informs him that he’s on a “farewell tour” and gives him a tender valedictory kiss and a warning to keep safe.

But Pride doesn’t want to startle its audience with any of the more challenging aspects of gay life. Apart from that dildo and a glimpse of a fetish club, this is a curiously sexless film. Joe stays out late one night and is seen next morning looking innocently radiant, but otherwise you could well believe that none of Pride’s characters actually have sex—least of all with each other. It’s almost as if Pride were less about sexual identity or socialism, and more about the potency of pop culture—that is, the power of young people to blow fresh air into the lives of the blinkered middle-aged.

Apart from a few young people—who are depicted as being as staid as their elders—the Welsh are depicted, not a little patronizingly, as dour, dusty, beige-clad and very sheltered provincials who need their ways shaken up a bit. What seems important about the LGSM here is not so much that they’re gay, or represent a different school of radicalism, but that they’re young, hip, modish dressers, up on all the latest music. You could almost emerge from Pride thinking that LGSM’s greatest achievement was in getting Welsh people dancing to Bronski Beat. Pride comes across, then, as a generation-clash drama as much as anything, and it’s significant that the most unsympathetic figures—Maureen, and Joe’s folks in the London suburbs—are bad parents, oppressive and possessive, who won’t let their children grow up and think for themselves (not dissimilar, then, to the role that Thatcher played in relation to the U.K.).

After the strike collapses, the film ends at a Pride rally in London in 1985. The LGSM delegation arrives, to be told by an organizer to put the banners away, because it’s been decided that the event should be celebratory rather than political. For much of the film, you feel that Pride has—by necessity, given its MOR prerogative—followed the same agenda. But in fact, the very final sequence proves to be celebratory and political, set to Billy Bragg’s impassioned rendition of “There Is Power in a Union.”

Despite the generally mechanical way it pursues its overarching will to please, Pride has a lot going for it—and the performances, especially Nighy’s, bring the film the classiness and nuance it needs. In any case, in a conservative 21st-century Britain dominated by consumerist hedonism, an older, more generous politics of play has its own argument to commend it. Pride ends with a banner showing hands clenched in friendship; as Dai says earlier, “Two hands, that’s what the Labour movement means—should mean.” It could hardly be more on the nose, more literal and populist, but these days a British mainstream film invoking solidarity, of all things, is a remarkable and welcome anomaly—as is that hopeful, provocative use of the word “should.” 

Bernardo Bertolucci is an unlikely director to venture into documentary. In his features, the real world is usually kept at a considerable distance from the hermetic, interior spaces in which his stories take place. The outside reality of May 1968 in The Dreamers (03) or the Japanese invasion of China in The Last Emperor (87) is little more than oblique suggestion, and often the drama of Bertolucci’s films is how little this outer world penetrates the delirious and decadent ones within. History is only a backdrop: what is “forbidden” about the Last Emperor’s Forbidden City is everything that’s outside the palace gates.

Bertolucci made only feature-length documentary, The Path of Oil (La Via del Petrolio) (1967). Its singularity suggests that the director’s foray into non-fiction filmmaking was enough to turn him against the form for the rest of his career. The project was not a total failure, of course. In a 1966 interview, just as he was completing editing on the film, Bertolucci was brimming with enthusiasm for having “[discovered] a way of filmmaking.” He relished the improvisatory freedom he and his small crew enjoyed as they traveled to the locations of the film’s three sections, the first comprising the extraction of oil from the Middle East, the second its transport across the Mediterranean, and the third its pipeline path to Western Europe: “I would shoot whatever hit my eye.” By 1968, Bertolucci had reconsidered his position on the film, which had been commissioned for Italian television and funded by Eni, the national petroleum company of Italy. In an interview for Cinema e film that year, he saw an irresolvable conflict between its commercial demands and his creative instincts. “Pasolini would say that I did an amphibiological film, neither fish nor fowl.”

The Path of Oil is noticeably disjointed, presumably because of the clash between its documentary interest in relaying facts and figures and Bertolucci’s lyrical inclinations. These are not necessarily incompatible elements, and for filmmakers like Rithy Panh, Chris Marker, or countless others, the tension between the two is what makes the work compelling. Bertolucci, however, struggles to resolve their differences, awkwardly imposing overblown prose in the voiceover narration or attempting to fit his dreamy loners to a landscape he’s less concerned with depicting. Of the latter, he searches for them among the mostly Italian workers he interviews. In these men, we see him yearning for stock figures familiar to cinema. As he described in a 1997 interview, “I filmed the drillers as if they were pioneers in an old western movie, the helicopter pilots as anarchistic and individualistic heroes, like the solitary figures of Godard or Only Angels Have Wings.”

More boldly, he invents the character of Mario, an Argentine poet-cum-journalist who leads us through the film’s third section, “Across Europe.” Mario is clearly an avatar for Bertolucci, or someone of his intellectual and artistic milieu. Wearing a fur cap, dark glasses, and a camera around his neck, he’s lost in his thoughts, which, as we hear in his narration, are full of cinematic and literary references. When visiting with an engineer at a pumping station, he remarks that the surge drum reminds him of Antonioni’s Red Desert. Mario, seemingly disinterested in his actual task of reportage, asks him, “you’re not neurotic like the characters in the film?” Later, when Mario falls asleep in a car, he dreams of “cinematomatic images” like those of Cocteau. This interlude, largely recounted in voiceover, and followed by a long indoor scene of Mario in a pub, is more vividly described than Etroubles, the snow-covered mountain town in which he has lost track of his guide, much less the pipeline.

This being a Bertolucci film, the black and white cinematography is visually stunning, at times otherworldly. In a scene that introduces the film’s title, a man stands against an evening desert landscape, his headlamp marking a small point of light in the darkness. He raises a gun and shoots a round of flares into the distance. The voiceover explains that this is a scouting mission, as the flares ignite gasses leaking from untapped oil reserves. A giant blaze suddenly fills the screen: oil has been discovered, and with it a sense of danger and calamity. The film’s most captivating sequence occurs in part two, “The Journey,” as oil tankers glide down the Suez Canal. Bertolucci films one long, uninterrupted take from a town along the slender waterway, watching a massive ship pass silently across the end of an empty, palm-lined street.

Bertolucci’s flair for the exotic is most evident in part one, “Origins,” which was filmed in Iran. The camera scrutinizes the faces of children, old men, and veiled women who scurry through the bazaar or stop to return an accusatory stare. There’s more than a touch of Orientalism, and it doesn’t help that Bertolucci leaves untranslated the speech of the Iranian workers, while all the Italians he encounters are interviewed at length about their hardships, their longings for home, and their (sometimes negative) attitudes toward the Iranians they oversee. Though it’s not mentioned, the rampant European and American incursions into Iran, following the CIA-orchestrated democratic coup in 1953, can be read into the signs of a rapidly industrializing nation. Bertolucci seems to deliberately avoid this show of political force. In one scene, a group of Sudanese laborers are shown singing a work song. The voiceover makes the dubious claim that “the same words, the same musical iteration that accompanied the construction of the pharaoh’s pyramids, today accompanies the first desert power station.” The film is all too eager to cast its “Origins” section in the ancient past, and conveniently renders mute anyone who might argue otherwise. The voluble Mario of the third section, by contrast, is a torrent of high cultural references, existential angst, and, every once in a while, scattered observations about the landscapes he’s been charged to document.

The Path of Oil doesn’t shirk its documentary responsibilities, however conflicted Bertolucci might have been in conveying them. The film marks a booming moment in the developing global oil economy, in advance of the oil shortages and geopolitical entanglements of the decade following the film’s release, and well before the awareness of a climate crisis brought about by the consumption of fossil fuels. Though in the employ of Eni, Bertolucci deftly balances the company’s engineering feats at which we’re supposed to marvel with their profound effects on the land and cultures it touches. There are real and unalterable consequences to the extraction, transportation, and refinement of oil, from the broken fingernails of a drill worker to the graffitied image of an oil tanker scribbled next to the previous era’s symbol of commerce, the camel. In Western Europe, where the wintry streets appear undisturbed by the pipeline burrowed two meters below, the change is nevertheless inevitable. Make no mistake, industry has and continues to transform all aspects of “economic and human geography,” perhaps more than Bertolucci himself realized, and the worst is yet to come. It will rouse even the sleeping Mario, dreaming of Goethe’s footsteps and Mizoguchi’s hand-drawn carts, to its waking, earth-shattering reality.

The Path of Oil screens with Canal (Il Canale) at Anthology Film Archives on September 20, 2014.

Yes, I know. I was a teenaged know-it-all, as well as a rabid soixante-huitard, a serious pothead, occasional speed freak, and fanatical cinephile. I spent the summer of 1968, between my sophomore and junior years at Harpur College (aka SUNY Binghamton), in Berkeley, crashing on people’s couches, and hitchhiking when I felt like it to North Beach where I had a menial job in the Ramparts magazine mailroom. My “supervisor” was an ex-Digger who didn’t believe in paying for anything and had a scam for everything.

When I got back to New York, I came up with my own scam, writing to the Film Society of Lincoln Center on behalf of a non-existent film magazine (the “Harpur Film Journal” or some such) and securing press credentials to cover the 1968 New York Film Festival. Incredibly, this ruse worked three times, even though I never bothered to furnish the festival press office with anything even resembling clippings. At least once, however, I wrote a festival report—a 10-page single-spaced screed run off on a mimeograph machine, and distributed at one of the Harpur Film Society’s fall presentations, where it most likely wound up on the floor beneath the auditorium seats.

Forty-five years later at the behest of Scott MacDonald, who is writing an oral history of Harpur film culture, I found a copy of this samizdat in deep, deep storage and belatedly sent it to the NYFF for their files—and amusement. FILM COMMENT editor Gavin Smith suggested posting it online. I couldn’t refuse. What goes around, comes around: for most of the many years I spent at The Village Voice I imagined that my ideal reader was the teenaged Me. This passionate if puerile moviegoer is that guy.

REPORT ON THE N.Y. FILM FESTIVAL 1968

Jim Hoberman

What the Festival Isn’t:

        Unlike European Festivals, that at Lincoln Center isn’t primarily a market place--no parties for distributors/no starlets balling their way to the top/no prizes awarded. (An unbought film may attract a U.S. distributor if the press following its festival showing is unusually favorable, but this rarely happens.)

        Neither (& this is why Jonas Mekas’ anger, tho understandable, is unjustified) is the festival a showcase for revolutionary &/or avant-garde films. (The festival board [footnote 1] may think it is, but Godard notwithstanding, it isn’t.) Revolutionary films should be shown in the street & the screening in the plastic citadel of High Kulcha would emasculate & not enhance the works of avant-garde film-makers.

What the Festival is:

        It’s a collection of some interesting recent commercial flix with a few esoteric blasts-from-the-past thrown in for good measure.

My Shit List (I’ll get it out-of-the- first):

        I saw 22 films in 10 days & only walked out on two: HUGO & JOSEFIN, & TROPICS. The former is blurbed ELVIRA MADIGAN Saturday matinee-style (which should have warned me away) but I doubt that any normal kid could tolerate its self-conscious cuteness for very long. Actually, the flick isn’t for kids at all, but for the art house adults who warm up their hearts on A MAN AND A WOMAN and then break them on ELVIRA MADIGAN. If you fit the description and are still interested HUGO & JOSEFIN is as pretty as a sunset-over-Stockholm travelogue and vacuous as a training bra.

        TROPICS is a political film and even tho I dug its polemic (revolution in South America/creation of a third world) I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t make it as a movie. It’s even lousy propaganda (endless and repetitive/poorly edited/horrendously acted) as well as artistically fraudulent--the actors are non-actors (Brazilian dust farmers) working with a script they can’t handle and this is supposed to be “fictional documentary” (footnote 2). Director Gianni Amico should have thrown out his screenplay and let the people talk--the raw reality of suffering doesn’t have to be staged. You can make revolutionary art in the studio (GRAPES OF WRATH) but if you want to make it in the field then leave the studio at home. People’s lives aren’t nice linear dramatic progressions, but if that’s what you want it can be done in the editing room. TROPICS will turning up on the New Left benefit circuit in a year or so and the best thing a sympathizer could do would be buy a ticket and read Franz Fanon in the lobby.

        24 HOURS IN A WOMAN’S LIFE is a ridiculous film: the tragedy of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am one night stand if you’re a middle aged rich lady & World War I is outside collapsing values in general. It’s a first feature by a former Fellini assistant, Dominique Delouche, and despite some well-composed shots, the flick’s as draggy as the wooden sex scenes--the lovers awkwardly posed with sheets discreetly arranged to cover breasts and genitalia.

        Claude Chabrol (THE COUSINS, LANDRU, THE CHAMPAGNE MURDERS) is a charter member of the new wave-cahiers du cinema axis--but his latest, LES BICHES, is light years behind the work of his ex-colleagues Godard, Truffout, & Rivette. There’s this AC-DC triangle culminating in madness and murder, & tho Chabrol is technically proficient--slick as any 20th Century Fox mainstay--his brand of Gallic sophistication is stale and the lesbian exotica is just a new rhinestone on the collar of a dead horse.

        The flick opens well with Stephane Audran (Mrs. Chabrol)--done up like Djuna Barnes in 1930’s lesbian chic and coming on like the most evil, alluring bitch in the world--picking up an innocent sidewalk artist on a Paris bridge. Chabrol creates a tension (with foggy, muted colors/minimal but double-edged dialogue/and alternate up-down angles) and a sense of impending doom which holds the picture together for about 10 minutes. But what promises to be a tough Oscar Wildean innocence-and-corruption tale degenerates into mediocre predictability and finally boring triteness. For those interested the artist is poorly played by Jacqueline Sassard (ACCIDENT), & Jean-Louis Trintignant (A MAN AND A WOMAN) walks witlessly through the male-of-the-triangle role.

        Inertia and air-conditioning enabled me to see how 24 HOURS & LES BICHES turned out. They’re both placid, well-constructed surfaces--no jarring elements. Chabrol’s mocking savoir faire is just as sentimental (though more fashionable) as Delouche’s lush romanticism and both cling to sexual moralities which everyone else has kind of been ignoring for at least 50 years.

Czex and Miscellaneous East Europeans:

        Czex films have been recent favorites in N.Y. and of course now more than ever. Political considerations aside, their popularity isn’t hard to fathom--they combine strong humanism with shy and off-beat humor/virtually every Czex director has been processed at Famu (the national film academy, which provides the world’s finest technical education outside of Hollywood)/they’re all young and have (up till now) had large government subsidies to play around with. In short, the Czex filmmakers enjoyed all Hollywood benefits as well as the advantage (in apolitical films) of greater independence than all but a few in Hollywood can claim.

        There are two trends in the Czex new wave--the humanists (influenced by Renoir and the Italian neo-realists) & the allegorists (inevitable compared to Kafka but not much like him) who have a strong political orientation. These trends also exist (to a lesser and not clearly defined extent) in the Polish, Yugoslavian, and Hungarian cinemas.

        Jan Nemec’s REPORT ON THE PARTY AND THE GUESTS proved to be the Establishment press’ fave-rave: an allegorical treatment of individual acquiescence in the face of totalitarianism, banned in Czechoslovakia for two years--released under Dubcek and now re-banned. It’s fitfully interesting and generally unexciting--the rhythm is so screwed up I spent most of the movie waiting for things to happen and then it ended. (I guess it’s only fair to say that I dislike allegory anyhow and the fact that the film was made at all is reason enough to see it. Still it lacks the power and anger of Bunuel’s treatment of a similar theme in THE EXTERMINATING ANGLE. It would be interesting to put REPORT on a double bill with THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST or POINTBLANK, 2 Hollywood films (ignored by the same liberal critics who lavished over-praise on REPORT) which deal with totalitarianism a little more subtly and a lot closer to home.)

        Another film by Nemec was screened--ORATORIO FOR PRAGUE--a documentary on life in Czechoslovakia during the Dubcek reforms. As Nemec was completing its shooting the Russians invaded and there is some occupation footage included. What was intended as a celebration became a memorial and it was smuggled abroad for editing. ORATORIO has all of REPORT’S faults (poor development/flawed rhythm/dull stretches) plus a few of its own (a totally inane commentary). As in REPORT the content barely triumphs over its inadequacies; and if only for its uniqueness, it’s worth your time≥

        The other 2 Czech films (which liberal sentiment had open & close the festival) are more successful (tho also critically overrated) & are good examples of the strengths and weaknesses of the humanist directors. CAPRICIOUS SUMMER is Jiri Menzel’s second feature and it suffers by comparison with his first (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) being neither as tight nor as inventive. It’s good divertissement (i.e. solid camerawork/eastman color & some skin to groove on). 3 middle-aged vacationers pursue the beautiful assistant of a down & out magician (well played by Menzel, whose acting is, in this case, superior to his direction). On successive nites, each of the three gets his chance with the chick but pisses it away (more or less); the magician splits and the three pals are left feeling sadder-but-wiser & more middle-aged. It’s slight stuff and Menzel can’t quite make it work--he tends to confuse pretty countryside and quaint doings with lyric pastoralism & passes off sentimentality for nostalgia. The music is unusually offensive/the humor more obvious and less biting than in CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS, with too much Hollywood rain and splashstick (over-turning boats/people pushed into the lake fully clothed)--but I dig Menzel, I dig his vision--he’s into and gets behind the small objects with which people clutter their lives & railway clerks their desks--& I would dig being more enthusiastic, but like I said it’s good divertissement.

        THE FIREMAN’S BALL by Milos Forman (LOVES OF A BLONDE) was the best of the CZEX films shown. Working with even slighter material than Menzel--the various elements (stolen lottery prizes/reluctant beauty queens/status wars/& an unexpected fire) Forman has made an effective and ironic study of human behavior--universal and compassionate (tho not as good) as the work of his mentors, Chaplin & Renoir. Word got out after the press screening that the film was really a subtle political indictment of pre-Dubcek Czechoslovakia, which may be so (tho though it never occurred to me during the film) but it seems that in this case Forman is more concerned with the broader politics structuring every anecdote and any communal undertaking.

        (Incidentally, Nemec, Menzel, & Forman are all now in the west and working on projects financed by the French producers of Truffaut and Godard.)

        The other East European films, Miklos Jancso’s THE RED AND THE WHITE and Vatroslav Mimica’s KAYA are from Hungary and Yugoslavia respectively. The former has some fine action photography (John Ford style) but isn’t much more than cowboys and indians in Russian revolutionary drag. KAYA is a puzzling film--the color photography is unusually good & the location (an ancient Dalmatian town) well exploited, but Mimica’s overuse of static compositions coupled with a lack of any dramatic fire gave me the feeling of watching someone’s well composed vacation slides while tortured by their boring commentary. Mimica is primarily an animator which may explain his solid sense of design but inadequate handling of actors, dialogue, editing, etc.

The German Thing:

        From 1920 to 1932 the German film industry was the most creative in Europe. But what with Hitler at home & the lure of Hollywood gelt abroad every major director (Murnau, Lang, Ophüls, Lubitsch, Pabst) either split or went underground and nothing of any interest (excepting Leni Riefenstahl’s 2 propaganda films) was made in Germany for 35 years. But now things have changed and the festival directors, packaging 3 new German flix together, have pronounced a German renaissance, and it looks like (considering Berlin & everything) next year it will be their turn to open and close the festival.

        The most vividly trumpeted of the films is Alexander Kluge’s second feature ARTIST UNDER THE BIG TOP: PERPLEXED which copped the silver something at Venice this year. It’s not as well realized as the other German works shown--weighed down with a lot of heavy-handed and dried up symbols (life as a circus, etc) but it’s an interesting flick nevertheless. Kluge’s fragmented editing and disturbing juxtapositions (a Hitler rally with “Yesterday” sung in German on the track) are especially effective.

        Jean Marie Straub’s CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH is a hard film to sit through but if you can dig it, it’s like 90 minutes of Tantric exercises with the same cleansing results.  Nothing written can really describe its strange and beautiful quality and any plot synopsis will make it seem boring as a bitch. Straub fuses selections from the letters of Bach’s second wife (stoical descriptions of domestic tragedies and artistic frustrations) dramatizes a few short anecdotes, but concentrates most of the film on the music. The camera rarely moves but when it does the effect is tremendous. The whole film is suffused in Vermeer-like light & if you let it this film can do fine things for your head.

        SIGNS OF LIFE is the best first film by a European director since FIST IN HIS POCKET (1965). Werner Herzog is 26, under the worst possible conditions (all kinds of freak accidents during shooting/ a six month delay/& and a shortage of bread) has made a powerful, intense, and really together parable on the doomed revolt of a holy madman. It’s the kind of content that readily lends itself to leaden symbolism (viz. Kluge’s flick) &/or but also manages to incorporate all kinds of literary and mythic references & themes without encumbering the work’s flow. The camera-work & acting are fine and my only complaint is that the editing of the last 20 minutes could’ve been tightened up.

Something’s happening here:

        Lots of things are happening in American films, & one is that some very talented people are making quasi-Hollywood flix (that is, films with 5 & 6 digit budgets/union crews/professional actors/& above-ground distribution outlets) outside of Hollywood. These independently produced films are largely documentaries (PORTRAIT OF JASON, ON THE BOWERY, DON’T LOOK BACK) or else heavily influenced by documentary techniques (footnote 3) (THE COOL WORLD, THE CHELSEA GIRLS, & 2 films shown at Lincoln Center--John Cassavetes’ FACES and Norman Mailer’s BEYOND THE LAW).

        FACES was probably the festival’s most universally dug selection. (Renata Adler & Jonas Mekas both wrote it up in enthusiastic articles.) Cassavetes paid his dues as an actor and director long before ROSEMARY’S BABY made him a star. In fact, SHADOWS (1960), his first film, with its straight improvisation, was a big influence on everyone who got into it. After SHADOWS, Cassavetes worked in Hollywood for awhile, doing Stanley Kramerish didacto-flick (A CHILD IS WAITING) with Judy Garland & some other mediocrities. In a sense FACES is SHADOWS remade with 8 years of experience. It’s also an actor’s film and the performances are all brilliant. Cassavetes uses a nervous hand-held camera (plenty of zooms & constant motion--some of it due to a shaky grip-man) & deals with the really alienated segment of American society--the successful middle-aged pill-heads & divorce-freaks, the victims & perpetrators of cancerous suburbs and plastic culture. The characters are treated with sympathy & disgust & the flick is extraordinarily convincing.

 If FACES is social realism, then BEYOND THE LAW is metaphysical social realism, & like FACES a fine, fine movie. Where Cassavete uses the bourgeois schizophrenic attitudes toward sex and money, trying to find out what went wrong in the American dream, BEYOND THE LAW gets behind America’s ambivalence on violence & the cops.

        I think that Norman Mailer is a great visionary but a 2nd rate novelist & being a visionary it looks as though films may be his thing. BEYOND THE LAW is as profound & illuminating as the best of his apocalyptic reportage & exhibits the same deadly knowledge as to what’s going on around here. Mailer’s a breathing metaphor of America-the-beautiful intuiting or acting out the deepest yearnings of her collective soul. He’s the man who gives the real state-of-the-union message with no jive.

        In BEYOND THE LAW he does the cops & it’s the most open declaration of love-hate ever made by the Statue of Liberty to the blueman with a gun. (It’s the same affair implicit in every Hollywood gangster flick ever made & in the schizoid nature of a nation founded on violence but eternally craving law & order.) Mailer gets together a motley crew of friends (Rip Torn, Michael McClure, & George Plimpton are a few) & for 24 hours they played at police interrogation in an empty office building set up to look like a precinct house. It’s been edited to 2 hours & everything works perfectly. Mailer’s own characterization (Lt. Francis X. Pope) is the best sustained performance of his acting career--as beautiful & outrageous as his finest moments on the Alan Burke Show or during the legendary Buckley debates. Like FACES, BEYOND THE LAW is very funny/very intense/very loud/very serious/ & very important--saying tighten up America before it’s too late. D.A. Pennebaker (16mm’s James Wong Howe) did the camera-work, with his customary frenzy & it’s entirely faithful to Mailer’s vision.

Solid gold soul:

        TONI (1934) is a great film by Jean Renoir made at a time when the master could do no wrong: unhappy love & violent death against a background of strong leftist commentary. Unlike the social realists of the 30’s, Renoir is never didactic--his people are always round & never cardboard proletarians. This is the man who influences everyone from Satyajit Ray (who made PATHER PANCHALI) to Francoise (who walked out on it) & there’s nothing that he & a camera can’t do. His style is deceptively simple but totally inimitable, his handling of composition & light intuitive (it’s in his genes) & matches that of his old man, the painter. Renoir is also film’s great humanist and his compassionate-fatalistic Weltanschauung is the most Eastern head west of Rabindranath Tagore.

        Andrew Sarris thinks LOLA MONTES (1955) is the greatest film ever made & even if it isn’t as good as POTEMKIN or DUCK SOUP it’s still an amazing flick and a virtuoso performance by director Max Ophuls. Ophuls is the most maniacal motion-freak to ever make films. He doesn’t give a shit for close-ups or composition or montage or anything but movement: sweeping his camera thru extravagant sets, tracking fantastic endless arabesques. Even if romantic excesses & lush decor make you barf you can’t help but appreciate this film. It’s also the ultimate distillation of the baroque tradition & Ophuls’ vision of Lola Montes (Spanish dancer and the 19th century girl mistress to Lizst, the King of Bavaria, and about 15 others) as White Goddess is fascinating. The last shot of Lola (reduced to selling kisses in a New Orleans circus) redeeming the multitudes is one of the best single takes I’ve ever seen.

2 Old Masters:

        In the Menlo Park Movie Hall of Fame the 2 great individualists Bresson & Bunuel may stare each other down in eternal opposition, but Bresson’s new film, MOUCHETTE, hints that despite everything they may be reconciled in Heaven after all. Bunuel is impervious to style/Bresson is obsessed with it, even planning out interviews in advance. Bunuel claims to have never suggested a project to a producer & worked only on assignment/Bresson has made just 8 films in 25 years because of his refusal to compromise. Bunuel is a devout atheist/Bresson says “all is grace.” They are the 2 poets of the despised and rejected: MOUCHETTE is just a hair’s breath and semantics away from (say) LOS OLVIDADOS or VIRIDIANA, the difference being that for Bunuel saints are creeps (are human beings) and for Bresson creeps are saints (are human beings).

        MOUCHETTE is the 24 hour Calvary of a creep--an unloved adolescent girl, ugly & defiantly anti-social. Caught in a storm she is seduced & abandoned by a derelict poacher. When in the morning, she is rejected by her lover, her father, & even those arranging her mother’s funeral, she kills herself. The suicide sequence (backed by Monteverdi’s “Magnificat” Mouchette rolls herself down a hill several times until momentum throws her into the river) is tremendously moving. Bresson’s rarefied & austere cinema is not easy to get into but MOUCHETTE is the first film of his I’ve seen that I could dig as well as appreciate.

        Like Griffith, Orson Welles has been victimized by his own ego & had some great lapses in taste, & like Eisenstein he’s watched while uncomprehending and mediocre men have fucked up, mutilated & destroyed his private visions. These 3 are the great innovators--defining and encompassing the entire mainstream of cinematic grammar in 3 amazing films and they can be forgiven anything.

        THE IMMORTAL STORY has a script (by Welles) so awful that had anyone save himself directed it the damage would have been irreparable. Taking a light, ironic story by Isak Dineson, Welles treats it as tho it were more portentious than THE SEVENTH SEAL. Most of the acting stinks/Jeanne Moreau is once again grossly miscast/the track out of sync/the length is totally inappropriate, resulting in half-assed development which could been dropped along with 15 minutes or rounded out in an extra half hour--but it was made for a one hour slot on French T.V. and Welles has to take work where he can get it/the color is poorly processed/& the sets are shallow and inadequate.

        But none of these things matter much--Welles could make a solid movie out of one-minute toothpaste commercial & it’s good to see him back in circulation. His feeling for lighting & angles, depth & composition (while no different from anything he invented for CITIZEN KANE) is assured & mellow. If he’s no longer the most inventive movie-maker around--that is to say, if after 25 years & innumerable hassles he is not still young Tom Edison, he more than makes it as old Tom Edison.

        I would give the entire Festival proceeds towards the production of Welles’ next film. It would be nice if (for once) some nice rich sugar daddy came along & supplied Welles with all the time, money, & actors he needed, & financed the real sequel to CITIZEN KANE. (This mythical patron might stipulate Robbe-Grillet or someone comparable as a script assistant on the flick.)

2 Young Masters:

        Jacques Rivette & Bernardo Bertolucci are 2 of the best (& in direct proportion, least known) directors going, each with a well-realized & imaginative work screened at the Festival. Neither film has a U.S. distributor & both were generally ignored by the media.

        Rivette’s LA RELIGIEUSE has been banned in France since its completion 3 years ago. It’s a faithful adaptation of Diderot’s famed anti-clerical shocker of the 18th century & the graphic portrayal of sadism & lesbianism in various convents offended both Mme. de Gaulle & the Catholic Church--hence the ban. Rivette’s theme is the nature of freedom & the film is a plea for tolerance.

        In another sense, LA RELIGIEUSE is a homage to Griffith (who was filming his own 18th century melodramas in 1920)--Lillian Gish would’ve been a natural for the title role. (As it stands, Anna Karina’s performance is beautiful.) Rivette’s manipulation of color & space is striking & the creaky plot is directed so deftly that it might be Rivette’s 22nd film & not his 2nd. Unfortunately it seems destined for the obscurity of his first feature, PARIS BELONGS TO US (1958), which preceded BREATHLESS & THE 400 BLOWS as the first New Wave work. Tho widely admired by those who’ve seen it it has never been released abroad.

        Bertolucci is the latest of the impressive talents that have come out of Italy in an unbroken stream since World War 2. PARTNER is his 3rd film & it’s a considerable departure from the neo-neo-Realist tone of his earlier things. The screenplay (upon which Gianni Amico of TROPICS collaborated) is a free updating of Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” injected with heavy doses of Godard, the Living Theatre, & the new European radicalism. They’re potent influence & hard to digest & so PARTNER is kind of a mixed bag of tricks--some brilliant & some lousy. Still it’s an exciting film & Bertolucci (even if he occasionally strains) is hip to where film is heading. I dug it when I saw it but the next day Godard’s new stuff was screened which diminished PARTNER retrospectively & which I’d like to get into having saved the best for last. (Just one more thing) Pierre Clementi (he was the gold-toothed gangster in BELLE DE JOUR) gives a remarkable performance (& looks like the new Belmondo) as the double & his double.

The Man:

        Remember that I said Griffith, Eisenstein, & Welles were the big 3? Well, add Godard & you’ve got the big 4--he’s that good. His 2 films screened (footnote 4) (2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER & WEEKEND) were not only the best flix at the festival but the best films by any commercial film-maker since L’AVVENTURA & MARIENBAD. (The press showings, ⅔ empty for every other film, were packed for Godard & even Andy Warhol was there. Tho the man himself never came people awaited his rumored appearance the way those at this summer’s Newport Folk Festival hung around hoping for Dylan.) Unlike the big 3, there’s no one film in the Godard canon synthesizing his contribution, but there are enough ideas tossed off in 2 OR 3 THINGS & WEEKEND to keep everyone frantically assimilating for at least 5 years.

        2 OR 3 THINGS has no conventional plot--it’s a sociological essay on dehumanization, specifically in the newly built housing complexes of Paris (the “her” of the title) & with special attention paid to the young matrons who take up part-time prostitution in order to pay the rent. However, the sound-track could be erased & 2 OR 3 THINGS would still be a great & revolutionary film. For one thing Godard has subjugated (cinema)scope & the impact is enormous. Another thing is the quality of the color--there have been a lot of fine color flix but Godard’s color is magnificent. Godard pans infrequently, generally employing series of short static shots. His compositions are a whole new thing (the only word I can think of that fits is abstract-expressionist) & he’s capable of alchemy: converting the most banal & ugly modern architectural landscapes into poetry while simultaneously impressing you with their banality & ugliness. There also is plenty of Godard’s famous alienation devices (direct interviews/“pure” camera movements/titles &etc.) This film is formally so rich & inventive that literally 100s of films can come out of it. (PARTNER already has.)

        WEEKEND is technically quieter (no screenfilling closeups of a cigarette tip burning or scopic zooms over a cup of coffee) but even more revolutionary, being an apocalyptic vision of Western Civilization’s suicide-strangulation in a mammoth traffic jam & a call for our culture’s bloody destruction/renewal. It’s a brutal film & when I saw it a lot of people were put up tight by what was on the screen. There’s never been anything like it--it’s playing in New York right now & if you care about movies or final things you shouldn’t be reading this, you should be on the bus.

Addenda:

        The shorts screened were almost uniformly awful, largely cute Czech cartoons & their cuter imitations. There were a few exceptions: THE BED, James Broughton’s lyric & hilarious hymn to procreation; Stan Vanderbeek’s first color computer film (POEM FIELD NO. 1) & A DAY WITH JIMMY PAGE (David Hoffman), a documentary of an 8mm Mozart. Also interspersed thru the screenings were 8 or 9 short silent CINETRACTS--anonymous works allegedly made by Resnais, Godard & other leading French directors during the Spring Revolution. Using newspaper stills, cartoons & slogans (without any moving footage) whoever made them has made the most effective radical polemics I’ve ever seen.

        All Czech films shown are now playing in New York along with  WEEKEND & LES BICHES. THE RED & THE WHITE, TROPICS, HUGO & JOSEFIN & BEYOND THE LAW have U.S. distributors & should open by the year’s end. TONI will be making the Bleeker St.-New Yorker-Thalia revival house circuit. Of the other 12 films only FACES’ press notices were sufficient to guarantee its eventual distribution. The remaining 11 could show up any time from 1969 to never (& the latter is more likely). Dig that this (in general) is a crime & in the cases of LOLA MONTES, the Welles film, MOUCHETTE, SIGNS OF LIFE, the Bach film, LA RELIGIEUSE & 2 OR 3 THINGS, it’s a sin.

Footnotes:

1. Amos Vogel, Richard Roud (author of the book “Godard”), Andrew Sarris & Susan Sontag.

2. Another one of those bullshit meaningless terms like “non-fiction novel.”

3. This school is also engaged in an interesting & important investigation of the nature of documentary itself. (Anything photographed on celluloid is in some sense real--this is to say that BEACH BLANKET BINGO is really a documentary of actors acting on movie sets, arranged (thru editing) in a Proustian achronological order.) The seminal works provoking this investigation are Jonas Mekas’ THE BRIG, which treated a theater piece as spontaneous reality & Shirley Clarke’s pirandellian THE CONNECTION, which is a fictional film about a documentary-in-progress. In straight documentaries everything is additionally complicated by the mere presence of a camera (which totally alters any “real” series of events.) Ex: DON’T LOOK BACK, a documentary which makes no refernce to the camera--thus pretending that it doesn’t exist--is basically fraudulent because the Bob Dylan it claims to show au naturale is obviously acting for the camera & thus the film is in a sense a filmed theatre piece. I can feel myself entering chinese boxes so I’ll cut this short but dig that there’s a dynamite PhD thesis in here for someone.

4. Godard’s latest opus & first in English (completed this summer), ONE PLUS ONE, which stars the Rolling Stones & has a soundtrack by them, was initially scheduled & then cancelled due to difficulties in processing the color print.

François Truffaut was in his early twenties when he wrote much of the film criticism that first made him famous. Soon after being encouraged to pursue the profession by his mentor André Bazin in 1953, the year he returned from a stint in the army, the young critic published a string of incendiary reviews and polemics—including his famous manifesto “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema”—that earned him a public profile as, in his words, “the demolisher of French cinema.” Truffaut, however, always seemed to regard his mission as fiercely, aggressively constructive. In 1975, when he belatedly compiled The Films in My Life—a collection of his film writings that covers several decades, but focuses predominantly on the mid-fifties—he selected positive reviews almost exclusively. To justify that decision, he quoted his hero Jean Renoir: “I considered that the world, and especially the cinema, was burdened with false gods. My task was to overthrow them.” It was a task given him, presumably, by the “real” gods—the films that mattered—to end when he replaced the false gods with the true ones. 

On this point, history has more or less borne Truffaut out. If, of the New Wave critics, Bazin was the great theorist, Truffaut now seems like the great enthusiast. He was a prototypical cinephile, for whom lists of venerated titles held an almost mystical power to inspire and evoke. Some of his best reviews are saturated with superfluous praise; perhaps no great critic has generated so much impassioned hot air. Surely none would have closed a review with a protective jeremiad of the sort Truffaut leveled against those of his readers who didn’t care for Hawks’s The Big Sky or Ray’s Johnny Guitar: “Anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films. Such people will never recognize inspiration, poetic intuition, or a framed picture, a shot, an idea, a good film, or even cinema itself.”

Truffaut’s Paris adolescence had been restless. He dropped out of school in his early teens and, by his account and those of others, spent much of his youth watching or thinking about movies. By 1953, he had developed a preternaturally confident prose style and a rich knowledge of film history. It was these qualities, mixed with the revolutionary optimism of youth, that equipped him to set himself up as the “destroyer”—or, if you prefer, the re-inventor—of French cinema. Much has been said about Truffaut’s opposition to the French “Tradition of Quality”—literary adaptations of the kind churned out by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, and against which Truffaut often railed as stodgy, inert, or award-grubbing. But Truffaut’s deeper, more radical fight was against the concept of masterpieces as such. “The question,” he wrote in a review of Abel Gance’s La Tour de Nesle,

is whether one can be both a genius and a failure. I believe, to the contrary, that failure is a talent . . . A film that succeeds, according to the common wisdom, is one in which all the elements are equally balanced in a whole that merits the adjective “perfect.” Still, I assert that perfection and success are mean, indecent, immoral and obscene.

It’s important not to miss the irony of these lines: Truffaut had a talent for cribbing the priggish, moralizing language of his critical opponents—“mean, indecent, immoral and obscene”—and turning it against them. It’s equally important to place them in the context of Truffaut’s often-overlooked capacity for self-mockery. From a few paragraphs earlier: “If you don’t see immediately [after comparing Assia Noris’s performances in Gance’s film and someone else’s] that Gance was a genius, you and I do not have the same notion of cinema. (Mine, obviously, is the correct one.)”

Truffaut’s deploring of “masterpieces,” his preference for the noble failure over the timid, “reasonable” success, was, in fact, a fairly brilliant rhetorical move. His intention was to redefine the masterpiece, not to overthrow it—less to embrace failure than to unmask it as success (and vice versa). After the gauntlet-throwing passage above, he went on to list over four lines’ worth of film titles, some marginalized today, others safely canonized: L’Atalante, Metropolis, Sunrise, The Rules of the Game, Intolerance. No matter which film is under consideration, Truffaut tends to reverently invoke the same handful of directors like a pantheon of saints: Renoir, Sternberg, Welles, Chaplin, Gance, Rossellini, Vigo, Cocteau, Murnau. His was a canon of films chosen based on the extent to which they resisted being reified in, or pinned down by, a canon—but it was, he knew, a canon nonetheless.

That loaded word “genius” appears often, usually unironically, in Truffaut’s writings from 1954 and 1955, the year in which he made his first short, Une Visite. Its usage peters out—though its watered-down synonym “greatness” still recurs—after Truffaut had started to devote himself more seriously to filmmaking. Possibly a kind of doubt was setting in at that point for Truffaut over his own innate capabilities as an artist, like the doubts of a Calvinist over his place in the elect. By 1956, at any rate, age and experience had tempered some of Truffaut’s absolutism. He began to view greatness in filmmaking less as an inbuilt aptitude, solid and indivisible, and more as something cultivated: a strenuous enhancement of one’s abilities and a working-out of one’s limits over time. The old faith, however, never vanished for good. “I speak of what can be learned,” he wrote in a 1968 piece on Lubitsch. “But what cannot be learned or bought is the charm and mischievousness . . . of Lubitsch, which truly made him a prince.”

That piece, “Lubitsch was a Prince,” is one of Truffaut’s finest moments: a sharply observed reflection on the filmmaker’s relationship with the audience—“the prodigious ellipses in his plots work only because our laughter bridges the scenes”—that ends on a thrilling close reading of a single scene in Trouble in Paradise. Lubitsch was, in many ways, an ideal subject for Truffaut, who gravitated towards the worldly, warm-blooded, skeptical, free-spirited, and (in Griffith and Gance’s case) monomaniacal. Truffaut never knew what to do with Ford, to whom he devotes one oddly insubstantial page-long piece in The Films in My Life. (“And, since Ford believed in God: God bless John Ford.”) In his uncharacteristically tentative piece on Dreyer, he suggests that it’s only when Johannes—the mad brother in Ordet who carries out the film’s climactic miracle—“comes to recognize his delusion [that he] ‘receives’ spiritual power,” effectively denying with a pair of scare quotes the miracle whose reality the film emphatically asserts. He was greatly concerned with historical, documented evils—he returns over and over in these pages to Resnais’s Night and Fog—but baffled by Evil as a concept. In his review of The Night of the Hunter, he inexplicably suggests that “all the characters are good, even the apparently evil preacher.” (I shudder to imagine what character, by these standards, he would consider evil.)

Every critic, of course, has his particular limitations. If Truffaut now comes off as more limited than most other critics of his caliber, it is at least partly on account of his youth. The Films in My Life is a document of wild, irrepressible energy that, accordingly, lacks a certain degree of structure, discipline, and rigor. Reading it, you start to suspect that the short review was a form well suited to Truffaut’s early-blooming talents; any longer, perhaps, and he would have started to burn out. But then Truffaut surprises you, giving the piece a jolt of humility or a frisson of insight seemingly out of step with his age. His deeper limitation was his undeniable chauvinism, for which there is no excuse; witness his cringe-worthy description of the wife in Bigger Than Life, “who feels things but has given up trying to express them, since she cannot handle the language.” (“She is,” he continues, “like many women, intuitive, governed above all by love and sensitivity.”)

One of the more poignant aspects of The Films in My Life is that it reads like the brilliant early work of a critic whose voice would, if the volume’s lengthy, wonderfully candid autobiographical introduction is any indication, have grown wiser and more refined with time. (After hinting at a desire to take up writing again, Truffaut died suddenly of a brain tumor at the age of 54.) But Truffaut rarely seemed drawn to the wise, wistful detachment of late style. His sympathies lay with the reckless, spontaneous, and daring: the filmmakers, as he once put it, who were willing to make sacrifices. And it’s not clear that time would have preserved Truffaut’s own recklessness. “I am no longer a film critic,” he wrote in an admiring 1967 piece on Claude Berri’s The Two of Us, “and I realize that it’s presumptuous to write about a film one has seen only three times.” There is, to be sure, some of the old irony here, but there is also an increased cautiousness, a risen inhibition that would, perhaps, have stamped out some of the youthful Truffaut’s most thrilling provocations. Better, then, to let these early spark-plug reviews stand for what they are: some of our most essential accounts of what it’s like to be young, in love with movies, fiercely critical, and generously endowed with the talent to fail.

"The Films In My Life" by Francoise Truffaut on Ganxy

Every director has a few embarrassments chained up in the attic of his or her filmography, but not Takashi Miike. “I never made a movie I didn’t want to make,” he said in an interview back in 2001, but that’s a bold claim when you’ve got close to 100 films under your belt; 96 to be exact, according to Tom Mes, author of Agitator and Re-Agitator, the definitive English-language books on Miike. Tom made some time to talk with Kaiju Shakedown via email. Because when you’re talking about Miike, you need to talk to Tom. 

“Miike's criteria for selecting projects is often based on the people he gets to work with,” Mes says. “And there have been a number of producers that he's enjoyed working with so much that he's continued to accept even off-the-wall or really low-budget projects.” Miike is the man who can’t say no, and that’s led him to some pretty weird places. Like Yasukuni, the shrine for Japan’s war dead.

Built in Tokyo in 1869, Yasukuni originally honored those who died in service to the Empire, although now it honors all of Japan’s war dead, including 1,068 soldiers convicted of war crimes (14 of them Class A war criminals). Over the years it’s become a flashpoint for controversy and a beloved symbol of Japan’s conservative right-wing movement. On its grounds is the Yushukan, a museum commemorating these soldiers, which has been criticized for its revisionist take on World War II, including portraying the Japanese army as “saving” the city of Nanking, rather than pillaging it and killing many of its inhabitants. The Yushukan’s other claim to fame is that its gift shop is the only place where one can purchase A Vow for Peace, an animated film directed by Miike. Running slightly under an hour, it has two parts: one about the Yamaga Lantern Festival, and then Keiu Matsuo and his Mother, a 44-minute movie about a young man who participated in the Japanese Navy's midget submarine attacks on Sydney Harbor in 1942. In a bonus bit of strange bedfellowship, Takashi Yamazaki, the director behind the Always movies and the massive, controversial hit Eternal Zero, worked on the CGI in the film. Mes also points out that the movie’s Japanese title is Heiwa e no ukei, but that “ukei” can mean “vow” or “right-wing” depending on how it’s written, so an alternate reading of the title would be Right-Wingers for Peace.

Kumamoto Monogatari

The man who got Miike involved with this project is Kaoru Hanaki, whose production company Bull-X mostly makes commercials. A longtime buddy of Miike’s all the way back to his Full Metal Yakuza (97) days, in which he played the yakuza eyeball-licker, Hanaki is also responsible for Miike’s oddball Kumamoto Monogatari trilogy (01). Miike talks about these movies in a 2001 interview in Patrick Macias’s invaluable book, Tokyoscope:

“Once a year for the last three years I've made films for the Kumamoto Department of Education. Because they are so far out in the suburbs, they haven't seen too many of my films . . . These films are made to help support the neighborhood through rough economic times. The stories are based on historical subjects and mythological characters native to the area. The next one will be about the collapse of the Yamato Kingdom, only with an extremely cheap budget. We'll make a spectacle with dry ice and fire. We don't use village actors, we hire professionals like Renji Ishibashi and Ren Osugi. They'll be wearing animal costumes and masks.”

Designed to be screened at a local history museum in the Kumamoto Prefecture, these three short films (altogether they run just about two hours) are like something from a parallel universe where Miike is the head of the A/V club at an elementary school for strange students. As Mes explains, “Each of the three films deals with a different era in the history and mythology of Kumamoto prefecture, and yes, they were shot on really tiny budgets. The special effects are very rudimentary, of the kind you see in educational films screened in regional and local museums in Japan, where they will show those CGI reconstructions of long-gone castles.” Making things even more surreal is the fact that these movies star professional actors like Kazuki Kitamura (The Raid 2: Berandal), Yoshio Harada (Alleycat Rock: Crazy Riders '71), and Mikijiro Hira (13 Assassins). 

Silver

Despite the involvement of Hanaki, they’re decidedly not right-wing. One of them, Defender’s Song, is notable not only for its 3-D segments in which digital arrows creep across the screen like crippled buffalo, but also for making the case that Korea had many positive influences on the development of Japanese culture. Woman in the Revolt of the Clans, probably the most lavish of the three, is about the role of female warriors in a local civil war. 

Less wholesome, and only slightly more accomplished, are the fruits of Miike’s collaborations with Hisao Maki, a black belt in karate and creator of the manga WARU and Futari no Joe, a spin-off from the legendary boxing manga Ashita no Joe, created by his older brother, Ikki Kajiwara. First teaming up with Miike on 1992’s A Human Murder Weapon, which Mes describes as “dire,” Maki was a larger-than-life macho man who wildly overestimated his own talents, but one can imagine he was a hoot to hang out with. For Miike, he wrote a series of films about underground karate-spy-wrestling rings that often involved sexual humiliation, lady wrestlers, and strap-on dildos. There’s the Bodyguard Kiba trilogy and, most watchable of them all, Silver (99), on which Maki is credited as producer, writer, action director, and actor (he plays a karate teacher). Strangely enough, Maki would also write the novel that became the basis for one of Miike’s most poignant movies, Big Bang Love Juvenile A (06), a Jean Genet–esque love story between two boys locked up in prison which also involves rocket ships and Mayan temples. (WARU was later adapted into a 2005 movie by Miike and became the basis for an actual Japanese fighting league, presumably without the strap-ons.) 

N-Girls vs. Vampire

Miike’s back catalogue is full of these low-budget oddities, like N-Girls vs. Vampire (99) (aka Man, Next Natural Girl: 100 Nights in Yokohama) a semi-sequel to Man, A Natural Girl (98) about a street-tough schoolgirl battling a modeling agency run by vampires. Shot on Betacam instead of digital video, its cinematographer is Hideo Yamamoto (Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer, One Missed Call, The Great Yokai War, and many more for Miike), and the movie plays like an apocalyptically neon-lit forerunner to Twilight, full of dodgy CGI effects and featuring a totally evil vampire boy who falls for our two-fisted schoolgirl, Man. “Yuuya’s hated women ever since his mother abandoned him when he was little,” a young boy explains to Man. “But then he met you. He never met anyone as gentle as you are.” In the next scene, someone barfs up a bucket of blood.

In recent years, things have changed. Maki has passed away, and there are fewer and fewer weird projects out there as the Japanese film industry battens down the hatches. Miike, too, has slowed down, sometimes only turning out two movies a year as he’s had more box-office success. As Mes puts it: “For the small-time producer of such a project to ask a favor of one of the most prolific, successful, and high-profile filmmakers in Japan requires either a lot of guts or an existing connection.” There’s also another producer in Miike’s life, Misako Saka. Also Miike's life partner, Saka established herself as his manager around the time of One Missed Call (03). “Over the past 10 years, she has quite shrewdly shepherded him from the turning point that was Gozu’s selection for the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes to a mainstream career in the domestic film industry, as well as his status as a favorite of the highest film-festival echelon,” Mes says. One also gets the impression that she doesn’t mind saying no to a lot of Miike’s old buddies.

Sun Scarred

Fortunately, Miike still directs the occasional offbeat, low-budget project, and the results can sometimes be stunning. In 2006, he turned out Sun Scarred for Cinema Paradise, a production company that came out of the wave of V-cinema bottom-feeders that appeared almost overnight in the Nineties. Beautifully gritty, and with an offhanded naturalism that keeps bleeding over into experimentalism (entire dialogue scenes are shot without sound), it’s a Death Wish–style story in which Show Aikawa gives one of the best performances of his career as an architect (just like Charles Bronson in Death Wish) taking on a band of sadistic middle-school kids who target him after he stops their beating of a homeless man. It’s an off-kilter minor masterpiece from Miike that belongs at the very least in his top 20, and the kind of small gem he doesn’t make much anymore. I’d say that was too bad, but with 96 movies in his back catalogue, there’s still a lot of digging for all of us to do.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

…The Koreans are crowing that Roaring Currents has now earned $2.49 million in North American theaters, beating out the record previously held by Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (03) to become supposedly the highest-grossing Korean movie ever released in the U.S., which is neat since it’s currently the highest-grossing movie of all time back home. Sorry, guys, but no matter how hard you try, no one can wish away D-War (07), which is still the actual highest-grossing Korean movie of all time in North America with $10.97 million to its name. Come on. Be proud of your terrible movies, Korea!

…This is how rumors happen. Fan sites are hyperventilating that Sammo Hung is directing Jackie Chan for the first time since 1997’s Mr. Nice Guy in a movie called Old Soldier! OMG—that is amazing! Or, rather, it would be if it was true. In reality, the part was a cameo in Sammo’s new movie and Jackie didn’t have time to do it anyway. But they did get the title right.

…Think America is puritanical? There’s a public outcry in Korea for two actors to be suspended from all commercial advertising even though neither of them has actually done anything wrong. Lee Byung-hun (GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, I Saw the Devil) was blackmailed by at least one other celebrity (Dahee, singer for the K-Pop band GLAM, and a woman identified as actress and model Lee Ji-Yeon, although her management says that this is a case of mistaken identity) for $5 million, with the threat that a cell-phone recording of him having “inappropriate” conversation about his sexual preferences would be released. Lee immediately reported it to the police, and arrests were made. But a petition calling for him to be dropped from all advertising still gained 4,000 signatures, making the claim that while viewers could choose not to watch his movies, they were forced to see his ads. Equally stupid was another clause in the same petition, calling for a commercial boycott of actress Han Hyo-joo (Cold Eyes) because her brother bullied someone during his military service last year and she should be responsible for his behavior.

…Remember Anthony Wong, scrappy Hong Kong actor with way too much talent and fearlessness about the kind of roles he picked? Now he’s a very rich Anthony Wong who has decided that he deserves more creature comforts, and it’s hard to argue. After all, the man has paid his dues. But these days, Anthony is accompanied by an entourage of assistants, and he’s getting in fights with television producers over the quality of the hotel rooms they pick out for him. Oh, Anthony, we thought you were the man of iron.

…Remember the blockbuster Japanese film Shall We Dance? (96). Since then, its director, Masayuki Suo, has been going serious with films like the crime drama I Just Didn’t Do It (06). But now he’s back on point with a full-blown musical featuring big production numbers: Maiko wa Lady, a Japanese version of My Fair Lady that's about a country girl trying to become a geisha. The trailer doesn’t show enough to make a judgment call, but people seem to think it’s pretty charming.

Like many artists who straddle different mediums, Argentine filmmaker and novelist Martín Rejtman has alternated his focus over the course over his 28-year career, which in part explains the half-decade gap between his latest feature and 2009’s Elementary Training for Actors, which he co-directed with Federico Leon. Elementary was an adaptation of one of his books—he’s also adapted two others, Rapado (92) and Silvia Prieto (99)—but Two Shots Fired is an original screenplay.

Rejtman sustains a unique energy across all of his work, which combines droll dialogue with screwball-inspired situations and chance. In Two Shots Fired, 18-year-old Mariano (Rafael Federman) finds a revolver in his mother’s house and shoots himself in the stomach and head, but survives without lasting physical effects, save for an odd harmonic that’s only audible while he plays in a medieval flute quartet. His distraught mother (Susana Pampin) insists that he carry her clunky old cell phone with him at all times, even though it constantly emits shrieking reminders of long since missed calls. Without a job or any responsibilities to speak of, Mariano drifts along, sometimes engaging with the respective social circles of his mother and brother. As the routines and rhythms of these two sets of characters mirror and oppose each other, Rejtman paints a deft portrait of ennui in present-day Buenos Aires.

FILM COMMENT digital editor Violet Lucca spoke with Rejtman in August immediately following its first screening at the Locarno Film Festival. Two Shots Fired screens at NYFF on Monday, September 29th.

In this film and in The Magic Gloves, mental illness is definitely not the whole story, but it’s present, shaping the action. What draws you to that theme, or that element?

I really don’t know. I mean, my father was a manic-depressive, but that’s too personal. I don’t think that has a direct relationship with whatever I write—it’s just one more element. My way of working mixes together biographical elements, things that I witness, things that I read, and things that I steal from other movies. And then I put it together. People think that maybe there’s a special personal relationship with things, but sometimes there is not. In this film, the music quartet is there because I was involved in one when I was a kid, but there are many other things that I didn’t have any relationship to.

I didn’t even mean it on a personal level, I just meant as an element of the story. What draws you to it?

Thanks for making the question more interesting, because I always take it like, “Oh, I have to answer from the personal!” [Laughs] In Two Shots Fired, Mariano shoots himself twice: is it mental illness or not? For me it’s not. In The Magic Gloves, they take pills and drink, and nothing seems to affect anybody—it seems that these things aren’t really effective. It’s a way of showing how in life you go on, and things don’t affect you so much, and you still go on, and you still go on. Mental illness is one more of these things that is supposed to affect you deeply, and in my films it doesn’t. These characters are still part of a plot that is larger than their own lives.

You always maintain a substantial distance from your characters. Why do you prefer that approach?

I’m not very attracted to this flamboyant way of making films that makes the shot the principal thing in a film. I don’t like to make fancy shots, because I think they call too much attention to themselves. I try to find the right distance in terms of how much attention I pay to the characters, how much attention I want the audience to pay to the characters and to the story and to the scenes. This is a very delicate balance in terms of acting, in terms of position of the camera, in terms of editing. Sometimes I do it in the right way, sometimes I don’t. I also try just to use certain things with real care. For example, if you use too many close-ups, they’re not effective. When you have three or four close-ups in a film, they are there for a reason. It’s like getting the right energy. It’s also a matter of musicality and rhythm, and the size of the shots is part of the music, no?

Do you end up writing a lot more and then cutting things out as you edit, or is basically what you write the final version?

What I write is the final thing in terms of dialogue, usually. And in this film I just left some scenes out. I usually don’t.

Such as?

When they bring Lucía from the coast, there was another scene dropping Ana at the shopping mall, and she was getting back to work right then. And she was meeting her boyfriend there. I left that out. It was more direct to go to Lucía.

When you’re establishing these rhythms, do you shoot from multiple angles and have a lot of excess, or do you have it all worked out in your mind, you get it in the camera, and then work with that?

There isn’t excess, but I don’t have it in my mind either. I find it more and more during the shoot. Before, I used to draw storyboards, and nowadays I’m less precise. I have to confess that working on this film was like making a film for the first time. I was kind of lost during the shoot, never knew what to do, and I had to find my way little by little. It was difficult because it was a very long shoot, and we had too many scenes to shoot with very little time—not very little time, but you know, it was always very hectic and a lot of pressure. So it was like learning again. If I learned something, I don’t know, maybe I didn’t. And it was surprising for me, to feel so ignorant in a way, so empty somehow.

Why was that?

I think it’s because it’s been a long time since I made a feature film with a whole crew. The films I made in between—one is a documentary [Copacabana, 06], the other I made with seven people. A documentary’s different because you go and find whatever you have to shoot. And then I made Elementary Training for Actors [09] for TV, which we did with a crew from a television channel, and I co-directed it. Again, it was different. I swear, I felt completely empty, and I had to learn again how to make a movie. Now I kind of like that. I like the rawness of that situation, because I feel that my films are very primitive. As I said before, I don’t like the fancy shots, so maybe I would’ve felt comfortable during silent cinema, if it had sound. [Laughs]

As the moderator mentioned in the press conference, this film has a certain dynamic: the kids with the kids, the kids with their parents, and the parents with their parents, and there are these mirrored relationships, it’s sort of like a quartet. Was that intentional, or was that something that, when you were coming up with the story, it just developed?

It developed, but for me it was important. My first film, Rapado, was about teenagers, basically. Then, Silvia Prieto was about people who are twenty-something. The Magic Gloves is, like, late thirties. And then I said, okay, I have to mix everything up now, because otherwise I’m going to end up making a film in a retirement home or something. Cocoon, or something like that. [Laughs] And they don’t want that. It was intentional to mix everything up. But then I realized that there were different groups of people, like the music quartet, then all the adults, then the kids. And all the groups kind of dissolve.

I think what makes your films so special is that these people are talking, interacting in a very banal way, and then someone will say something totally absurd, like “She sent a nude.” And then if you think back, when the brother first opens up the picture he sort of has a funny look on his face, so we wonder: “Is she really ugly? What is wrong with this?” And then it’s casually revealed later. How do you create those rhythms in your mind, and by extension, how do you know when to shift from different character grooves?

It’s just instinct in a way. I mean, you asked about how to build the rhythm—that’s the whole work, actually. Usually it’s in the dialogue, but sometimes it’s not only in the dialogue, sometimes it’s in the actions. Sorry, I’m kind of slow because this is my first approach to the film, actually. Usually it takes me a while before I know what the film is about, and I never saw the film with an audience, so for me it’s like not seeing the film. I mean, I haven’t seen a DCP of the film yet. I never saw the film with a good quality image and good sound together, so it’s like, what is it? You saw more than I did.

Sound is huge in your work, and usually has an intrusive role. Is it just for comedic effect, or is that reflecting something larger aesthetically?

I’m completely obsessed with sound. During the sound mix I’m like a crazy person who’s listening to everything, and my sound mixer told me he never worked with somebody who had such a—not a “good ear,” but it’s like I hear everything. It’s my favorite part of the film, I love it. I always feel that I should’ve done more with the sound in order to play more in the sound mix, because it’s really my favorite game. Buenos Aires is a very, very noisy city, so it’s difficult to shoot with direct sound or to have clear sound, so I tend to shoot more in the outskirts now.

It’s also a personal thing. Sometimes I am disturbed by noises that other people don’t find disturbing. For example I had next to my house a garbage plant that was making extremely loud noises. I had to file a complaint and they made studies of the levels—I mean, I am kind of obsessed. Sound is like a thing for me. And I try to be a little more calm about it, and I put all that anxiety in the sounds of the film, maybe. Psychologically speaking.

Yes, I can relate. That’s why I ask.

You’re from New York?

Yes.

That’s noisy.

It’s little noises that bother me. Like someone chewing gum—it’s the worst!

Or somebody breathing heavily, you know? I was at a classical piano concert last Tuesday in Buenos Aires, and there was a guy next to me who was [simulates heavy breathing]. He was ruining my whole experience. I mean, I’m here to listen, I cannot put up with your breathing! But all those things are reflected somehow in the film, and it’s like a musical part that I don’t know what it is, because I’m building it in the sound mix, mostly. I know that there are going to be some sounds but I don’t know what they’re going to be during the shoot. For example, all the cell phones, I didn’t know what sound they were going to have. We picked them afterwards. And at one point we were using some sounds, but then we found out that they were all Apple, and we don’t have iPhones in the film, so we looked for others and we invented some.

What were you looking for with the casting? You’ve worked with Susana Pampin a couple of times before.

This is the third time I’ve worked with Susana. I know her well, and I know she’s a very good actress. She’s more “expansive” as she said [in the press conference] than what I want in a film, but she knows, so we work together with that.

As for the lead actor, we did the casting with so many, many, many actors. It was difficult to find somebody who could speak without putting too much intention in what he was saying. That’s always my problem. It took like two years. [Rafael Federman] isn’t an actor—he’s taken some courses in acting. I liked the way he looks—I mean, he can look a little sad, but also at the same time, he looks smart. And he’s extremely smart, he’s very clever. I related to him personally—I think he went to my same high school, and he’s Jewish. Violeta Bava, the producer, told me that for her, he looks similar to me when I was his age, in a way, even though she never met me back then. And other people told me the same. It’s like he had a familiarity with me.

Working with Susana, she knew what I wanted, so that’s liberating. The guy who plays Arturo played Susana’s husband in The Magic Gloves. And for that role, actually, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be him, so we saw every actor of his age in Argentina. All of them. And it never worked, and when he came, he just read a couple of lines and there was no doubt that it was him. He knew exactly what he had to do. So I guess I’m more difficult as a director than I thought. I mean, I am difficult—for the actors, it’s not easy, in Argentina at least, because I want them to say exactly the lines I wrote and they are more used to improvising. In other countries, I guess in the States it’s not like that.

It’s hard for people to improvise. It’s something that’s specialized.

Right, they just study and follow the lines, but in Argentina, they’re lazy, maybe. [Laughs]

It’s a different type of creativity.

It’s like, when I rehearse, they learn their lines in the way I want them to say it, so it’s like two jobs in one. So I don’t mind rehearsing because of that.

How did you find Daniela Pal who plays Liliana?

She’s really good. She was very difficult with her lines—but it was worth it. She works in theater, and isn’t very well known. The casting director suggested her. She’s surprising because you look at her and you already know, in a way, no? She’s saying so much with her body language and everything.

You said in the press conference that you didn’t want to do something that’s entirely a comedy or a drama. How do you know that you’re hitting that right emotional tone?

I don’t know. It’s very risky because it can be a total disaster, completely unbalanced. But I said okay, that’s why I’m making movies. I’m not doing a formula or anything. I’m just trying things out. And that’s why it takes me a long time to get the financing and to get the people involved, and this and that, because the movies are in between. And also they’re in-between art-house movies and non-art-house movies. That’s very difficult to market, and very difficult to get the money, because sometimes they feel that you need to make arty movies or social movies. But this is so ambiguous that they don’t know how to read it. But this is what I do, so I cannot change that.

When you see one of your films with an audience and hear what they’re laughing at, do you ever change your approach?

No. Never, never, never. I am the first person in the audience and I believe in my vision because otherwise I would be making somebody else’s film.