1. Jealousy 
Philippe Garrel, France

2. Stray Dogs 
Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France 

3. What Now? Remind Me 
Joaquim Pinto, Portugal 

4. Nobody's Daughter Haewon 
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea

5. Abuse of Weakness 
Catherine Breillat, France/Belgium/Germany

6.  Our Sunhi 
Hong Sang-soo, South Korea

7. The Strange Little Cat 
Ramon Zürcher, Germany

8. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness 
Ben Rivers & Ben Russell, Estonia/France

9. Story of My Death 
Albert Serra, Spain/France

10.  Club Sandwich 
Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico

History was brought to life in the top films in our 14th annual poll. The Coen Brothers’ portrait of a failed Sixties folk singer pulled ahead of Steve McQueen’s harrowing trip back to life under slavery. Not too far behind was The Act of Killing’s exposé of Indonesia’s thriving genocidal legacy, Andrew Bujalski’s doubly retro experiment in old-school video Computer Chess (plus, further down, Sarah Polley’s tricky family-saga hybrid Stories We Tell). Immersion cinema of a more contemporary sort—from Leviathan and Gravity, to the different deep ends of Spring Breakers and Upstream Color—also came on strong in a lineup featuring fewer foreign language titles than usual. A note on the poll’s workings: over 100 North American colleagues ranked their favorites in two categories: 1) those that received theatrical runs and 2) those viewed this year but currently with no announced plans for U.S. theatrical distribution. For each ballot, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on.

Readers' Poll: Readers are invited to stand up and be counted too! All entries will be automatically entered in our contest for free DVDs from the Criterion Collection. We will print the poll results in our March/April issue and publish your comments on the website. Send your ranked list of the year's 20 best films (plus any rants, raves, and insights) with your name, address, and phone number, to fcpoll@filmlinc.com. Deadline: February 3, 2014. First Prize: your choice of Criterion Collection DVDs, up to $200 in value. Second Prize: up to $120. Third & Fourth Prizes: up to $80. The winners, who will be picked by random draw, can select prizes, subject to availability, from the Criterion Collection catalogue.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis 
Joel & Ethan Coen, U.S.

2. 12 Years a Slave 
Steve McQueen, U.S. 

3. Before Midnight 
Richard Linklater, U.S. 

4. The Act of Killing 
Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/U.K.

5. A Touch of Sin 
Jia Zhang-ke, China

6.  Leviathan 
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, France/U.K./U.S.

7. Gravity 
Alfonso Cuarón, U.S.

8. Computer Chess 
Andrew Bujalski, U.S.

9. Frances Ha 
Noah Baumbach, U.S.

10.  Upstream Color 
Shane Carruth, U.S.

Don't see your favorite here? Proceed to the year's best undistributed list.

For the past 40 years, Martin Scorsese has been living one of contemporary cinema’s most fruitful and surprising double lives. Alongside the wide-canvas American epics for which he’s best known—stories of men, often working-class, driven to corruption and worse by their monomaniacal desire for wealth, power and fame—there has been a parallel strand of films, from The Last Waltz to Hugo, dedicated to the art of performance, the magic of the movies, and the relationship between artist and audience. The two threads have met before, perhaps most notably in 1982’s brilliant The King of Comedy, but they’ve never been quite as entangled as they are in The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese’s 23rd narrative feature.

The wolf of the title, like Henry Hill in Goodfellas and Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta (or, for that matter, Hugo’s Georges Méliès), is inspired by a figure too relentlessly self-mythologizing to invent: Jordan Belfort, the stock swindler who founded and ran the infamous “boiler room” firm Stratton Oakmont until 1998, when he was arrested and charged with over 10 counts of money-laundering and securities fraud. As played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he’s a performer without an off switch, a hungry young guy with a cooped-up ego and a head full of get-rich-or-die-trying ambitions. For the movie’s first two hours, which are pitched somewhere between Hill’s tweaked-out police-helicopter hide-and-seek in Goodfellas and James Franco’s “look at my shit” monologue in Spring Breakers, Belfort gives us a proud, enthusiastic voiceover account of his many public and private offenses, including a decade’s worth of pill-popping and coke-snorting, several drunken helicopter maneuvers, a selection of ritualized debasements (a young sales associate is paid to have her head shaved; a hired dwarf gets hurled against a target in the middle of a rowdy office), three-ways, orgies, blackouts, mountains of cash, and at least one capsized yacht. 

Belfort and his cronies—top among them his scarved-and-aviatored second-in-command, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill)—are far from the impeccably dressed mob men of Goodfellas or the charismatic urban warlords in Gangs of New York. These are loud, crude, boorish dudes bent on turning every inch of their lives into a showroom for their wealth. They have the same desperate need to show off as Scorsese’s former heroes, but none of the latter’s relative good taste. (And truth is skankier than fiction: Azoff’s real-life counterpart, refuting the movie’s charge that he and Belfort had a three-way with a 17-year old coworker, took the opportunity to boast that he’s “been with a zillion women.”) They’re not the kind of heroes that, as a director, you’d feel the need to dress up for, address in a more elevated tone, or dignify with any stylistic grace notes.

That turns out to be especially liberating for Scorsese, who, at 71, has made his noisiest, busiest, wildest movie in years, maybe ever. Nearly everything about The Wolf of Wall Street is giddily excessive: its three-hour runtime, its freeze-frames, its jump cuts, its incessant use of voiceover, its elaborate tracking shots, its FBI raid set to a pop-punk cover of “Mrs. Robinson,” its fetishistic slo-mo shots of vodka-drenched Quaaludes arcing through the air like lemon juice in a Red Lobster ad. But Scorsese has always been a deft pacer of action, and even at his most manic, he knows how to inject space into a film without killing the buzz. In an  extended setpiece midway through Wolf, the film slows to a literal crawl: reduced to a quivering mass by a Quaalude overdose, Jordan struggles agonizingly to roll down the four steps of a country club entrance—to reach the car he’ll then use to drive home. (After which point the action spirals into a full-blown slapstick routine involving a stubborn phone cord, a glass table, a Popeye cartoon, and an ill-timed choking fit.)

In its last hour, the film sobers up. The same drunken antics and fractured bonds that Scorsese’s young, stupid brokers would previously have written off with a tossed-off wisecrack start landing instead with dead, lingering thuds. By the time we arrive at Belfort’s unexpectedly reflective final-act conversations with Donnie, his halfway collaboration with the feds, and his post-prison career revival as a motivational speaker, the fear that Scorsese has been shooting fish in a barrel starts to seem misplaced. Sure, the obligatory soapbox pronouncements on the perils of corruption and the emptiness of hedonism are there if you look for them, but there’s also a touching ambivalence on Scorsese’s part towards his hero: a mixture of pity, disdain, fascination, and identification.

The Wolf of Wall Street is DiCaprio’s show. (The rest of the cast consists, for the most part, of spot-on but one-note eccentrics like Matthew McConaughey’s spray-tanned, chest-thumping billionaire and Jean Dujardin’s unscrupulous Swiss banker.) Belfort is ultimately a fuller expansion of one of the actor’s signature personas: the earnest, charismatic young man desperately trying to conceal the fact that he’s still, deep down, a petulant kid. Scorsese is drawn to the way Belfort keeps insisting to the people around him that he’s worth their attention—the middle-aged married men who end up agreeing to buy thousands of shares of junk “penny stocks” on the basis of one impassioned pitch, the would-be brokers willing to drop their past lives, jobs, and families to make those pitches, and, last but not least, those of us willing to spend three hours watching Belfort rave to us in winning voiceover about how much he makes in an hour. For all its close thematic ties to Scorsese’s previous studies of young men with God complexes, The Wolf of Wall Street might be closer in spirit to the director’s concert films, with their blurring of the divide between the movie’s audience and the on-screen crowd. Like Dylan, Jagger, or the Band, DiCaprio is working himself into a sweat to seduce us—on one level, because that’s just what Belfort did to his cronies and victims; on another, because he wants our respect and awe, if not our love or affection.

In this respect, the key scene is Belfort’s extended motivational speech to the office near the film’s halfway point. It’s a masterful piece of rhetoric, with DiCaprio assuming a role somewhere between a hellfire Baptist preacher and a general gearing his troops up for battle. (“Is your gas bill overdue? Good! Pick up the phone, and start dialing!”) By the end, he has his listeners standing on desks thumping their chests and chanting rhythmically, like the crowd at a rock concert or the new converts at a camp meeting. Still, however understandable the crowd’s response might be (it’s a hell of a speech), there’s a limit to how much we can identify with these frenzied white-collar salesmen. The turning point doesn’t come until the movie’s final shot, in which we find ourselves face-to-face with an audience from which we can’t so easily distance ourselves. If only for a moment, the screen becomes a mirror.  

Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are comedy’s premier purveyors of pop surrealism, and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is their most dream-like film since 2008’s Step Brothers. Their method is a modified exquisite corpse. They compose a temporary script, but once on set McKay yells out increasingly absurdist lines for his actors to test out. Then the performers can spin off their own variations, pushing farther afield from the narrative and closer to a space of pure play. Needing a story to get into theaters, Anchorman 2 uses the emergence of 24-hour cable news in the early 1980s as the spine which it will later snap.

Picking up at the end of the first Anchorman (04), Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) are the weekend anchors for a national news network in New York City. Corningstone is tapped by departing anchor Mack Tannen (Harrison Ford, one of innumerable cameos) to replace him on the nightly broadcast. Burgundy is canned, and splits from Veronica in a macho huff. He gets his News Team back together for a gig on GNN (Global News Network), where they ditch straight-up reporting and instead follow car chases and feature on-air crack smoking, garnering record ratings.

McKay has always had a progressive streak, and he stuffs Anchorman 2 with anti-corporate rhetoric and a broad caricature of Rupert Murdoch in the form of Kench Allenby (Josh Lawson), the corrupt owner of GNN. These are passing gestures, and any satiric bite is lost in the torrent of nonsensical gags that surround it. What is more radical in McKay’s work is his technique, which splinters the story until reality is overtaken by the phantoms of Burgundy’s disturbed unconscious—where he battles blindness, minotaurs, and the ghost of Stonewall Jackson.

Remove the commercial impetus and McKay’s films are not too far off from the digressive dream-reveries of Raul Ruiz (it would make a fine double bill with Night Across the Street). Where Ruiz comes out of the subversive Surrealist tradition, McKay and Ferrell make the kind of nonsensical, and less threatening, Hollywood art that the Surrealists prized on screen, including Buster Keaton.  Keaton came out of the vaudeville that led to the Marx Brothers and the anarchic TV implosions of Ernie Kovacs. That devotion to sketch improvisation continued in comedy troupes like Second City and the Groundlings, where Ferrell and McKay honed their chops. They don’t have the same freedoms as Ruiz did, and Anchorman 2 is positioned as a box-office behemoth, with one of the most aggressive promotional campaigns in recent history. Ferrell has been making appearances everywhere in character as Burgundy, from CNN to North Dakota local news, while Paramount scours Tumblr for marketable memes. Adweek ominously described it as the “model for the future of movie marketing.” After years of studio rejections for the sequel, Ferrell and McKay are paying their publicity dues, though with more creative control than normal (as a guest on the Conan O’Brien show, Burgundy called one of his pitchman products, the Dodge Durango, “a terrible car”).

As with Ruiz, their digressive storytelling can be both invigorating and enervating, as the film’s flow is continually impeded. McKay and Ferrell make it even more audience-unfriendly by ratcheting up the abrasiveness of the news team. Champ Kind (David Koechner), a lovable blowhard in the first film, is presented as a virulent racist and misogynist, banning Catholics and Jews from his cut-rate fried chicken joint (it’s not chicken), and advocating Burgundy to slug his black, female news director Linda Jackson (Meagan Good). The most cringe-inducing sequence is at a dinner with Jackson’s family, for which Burgundy adopts a fake “black” voice, his knowledge of African-American culture probably culled entirely from Huggy Bear episodes of Starsky and Hutch. It’s queasy and uncomfortable, and I wish McKay could have found a black comic to match Burgundy’s ignorance, instead of using Jackson’s family as a group of silent straight men.

Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) pursues Chani (Kristen Wiig) in a guttural mating ritual, the only bit in the movie that could be called a slow burn. Two slack-jawed yokels pawing at each other for warmth, Carell and Wiig use pockets of silence to pace their tentative union. Their scenes seem invented on the spot, a remedial game of word association that escalates into animalistic necking.  Paul Rudd as Brian Fantana has the least to do, though he remains a wonderful reactor, his dumbfounded double takes worthy of Leslie Nielsen. (He would be a smarter choice to fill Nielsen’s shoes in the proposed Naked Gun remake than the telegraphed smirk of Ed Helms.)

Ferrell remains a master of voice modulation, able to wring laughs out of raising his tone a few tremulous notches. Here he squeals like a whale and barks like a dog, but what has always keyed his comedy is body control. He’s a gangly 6 foot 3, and as Burgundy, he stiffens himself into a Frankenstein-like rigidity, as if he were constantly on alert for attacks against his masculinity. You can see it when Linda Jackson aggressively flirts with Burgundy in her office. Ferrell’s whole being seizes up, his evasive maneuvers executed with the grace of a Roomba.

Step Brothers is the purest expression of the McKay-Ferrell method, with its minimum of story and maximum of improvisatory madness. That movie ends in a massive group hallucination that has no equal in recent American comedy, at least until the anchor brawl in Anchorman 2. The scene reprises the joke from the first film—a bloodsport of competing broadcasters—but plunks it in the middle of the narrative climax. As plot strands are being tied up and Burgundy’s catharsis beckons past the next cut, the film instead shuts down and enters an extended fugue state. Taking pleasure in pure spectacle and the illogical associations made by McKay and Ferrell’s cracked imaginations, it’s an obscenely funny scene that rivals the controlled chaos of the climactic battle in Duck Soup, justifying everything that came before it.

Taking its title from Oscar Wilde’s children’s fable, Clio Barnard’s second feature might seem a drastic departure from her docufiction hybrid debut, The Arbor (10). But the new film draws more on the director’s experiences and observations on location at the Buttershaw estate—the public housing project in Bradford, England where The Arbor is set—than it does from Wilde’s story. Gritty and grim, The Selfish Giant serves up an ample second helping of British miserabilism, but this time Barnard has softened her story with a tenderness that makes the film (slightly) easier to digest.

At the center of The Selfish Giant is the friendship between Arbor (Conner Chapman) and “Swifty” (Shaun Thomas), two boys on the cusp of adolescence. A close-up of their hands firmly clasped together in the opening scene makes it clear from the outset that the pair have little to rely on besides each other. Arbor lives with his single mother and a delinquent half-brother who steals his ADHD meds to sell for a few quid. Without his “kiddie-coke,” the diminutive and foul-mouthed Arbor is frequently overcome by violent fits of rage, and the outstretched arm of the even-tempered Swifty is the only antidote.

Chubby and softhearted, Swifty is an easy target for schoolyard bullies who tease him relentlessly about his “pikey” parents. The extent of his family’s destitution is painfully illustrated when we witness his mother (Siobhan Finneran) dolloping meager portions of canned baked beans onto each of her eight children’s dinner plates while her abusive husband (Steve Evets), known as “Price Drop” in the neighborhood, hawks their last piece of living room furniture just to pay the electric bill. When Arbor comes to Swifty’s rescue one day at school, both boys receive suspensions, much to the chagrin of their mothers, who recognize that an education is the only chance their sons have at a better life.

Ever the opportunist, Arbor sees more payoff in “scrapping” than scholastic achievement. With a borrowed horse-and-cart, he coaxes Swifty to help him scavenge bits of metal from around the neighborhood, selling the bounty to a gruff and crooked scrapyard dealer ironically nicknamed Kitten (Sean Gilder). Arbor and Swifty graduate from pilfering prams and kitchen faucets to wrenching off car doors and electric piping, but the higher-profit work becomes increasingly dangerous, with Kitten gladly exploiting their willingness to take risks both legal and physical.

Like the giant’s garden in Wilde’s story, the scrapyard is plagued by perpetual winter. Overrun by heaps of jagged metal and tainted by Kitten’s one-dimensional icy demeanor, it is no place for children and yet it seems to be the boys’ only viable option for survival. If the film draws anything from the fable, it’s the theme of neglected youth—the very serious ramifications of children who have, as Wilde puts it, “nowhere to play.” Although their mothers genuinely care for their sons, they are ineffectual providers; it’s the kids who wind up paying their debts, literally salvaging all they can from the decay left behind by the older generation.

Though the landscape of Bradford is primarily brown and exceedingly dreary, The Selfish Giant is punctuated by a bounty of striking wide-angle shots that showcase the natural beauty of Northern England: serene rolling hills populated by gently grazing horses and starkly silhouetted trees. Cinematographer Mike Eley’s collapsed perspective lends a storybook quality to these images that seems to romanticize a pre-industrial past, particularly when juxtaposed against the endlessly harmful encroachments of modernity—the live wire that electrocutes a foal, for example.

In The Arbor Barnard imparted the estranging touch of fiction upon reality, using professional actors to lip-synch the audio interviews she had conducted with friends and family of playwright Andrea Dunbar. Here she relies on (talented) nonprofessionals to endow her fictional story with an effortless sense of realism. Though Thomas and Chapman are new to acting, they were familiar with the situations their characters find themselves in: casting director Amy Hubbard made sure to find Bradford boys who knew their way around scrapyards. Both deliver surprisingly powerful performances, driving the film forward with a palpable—and at times heart-wrenching—energy that overrides the screenplay’s minor flaws. The physicality of the overgrown Swifty and exceptionally runty Arbor make them a particularly endearing odd couple to watch, and their friendship feels real, from start to tragic finish.

With a story that risks mawkishness, Barnard maintains a relatively reserved but highly effective tone. The film’s final image completes a full visual circle that is sure to make even the stiffest upper lip quiver with emotion.

Spike Jonze’s Her is a tender, wry, deceptively modest package—and the closer you look, the more it reveals itself to be the proverbial Movie For Our Times. It would make a neat double bill with last year’s somewhat less distinctive Ruby Sparks, about a man who falls in love with the literary character he’s created but must come to terms with the gradually evolving autonomy of a woman who doesn’t intend only to be the eternal dream girlfriend. Her depicts a similar scenario, up to a point. Its hero doesn’t create his dream woman, not exactly—and in any case, she’s not really there, or strictly speaking, anywhere. She’s only a voice, an effect projected by a piece of computer software, although it’s hard to say for sure whether the laughing, purring tones and the mechanisms that generate her are or aren’t the real “Samantha.”

Her is set in one of those cinematic futures that are barely further away than next week. The setting is Los Angeles, where the colors radiate with a gentle candy glow, and the clothes have a 1980s cozy childishness about them—big glasses, tucked-in shirts. Everyone seems happy and independent yet oddly detached, forever in private conference with their phones; seem like any world you know? The notion of intimacy has so fallen into disrepair that protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) makes his living custom-composing intimate letters for others, printed out in an authentic hand-scripted look: the company is called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com.

Theodore is good at his job, a true artist when it comes to voicing intimacy on the behalf of others. Meanwhile he’s separated from his wife Catherine (a nicely brittle Rooney Mara) and spends much of his time at home interfacing with a sarcastic little cyber-alien in a 3-D game. Then he gets a new operating system for his computer, one tailored to his personality and needs. He chooses the female version, the installer asks him how he got on his mother…. and that’s all the OS needs to materialize as Samantha, a lifelike consciousness that spontaneously writes itself into being. Samantha is the perfect helper/secretary/surrogate mother for this needy overgrown boy, and better still, it/she has an irresistible voice, speaking in the husky, flirtatious, sweetly amused tones of Scarlett Johansson.

Before long, Theodore falls for Samantha and her perfectly attuned empathy—and, bizarrely, she falls for him. She develops a consciousness and, with it, a system of emotional and even sexual response. She begins by interacting with Theodore’s narcissism (“You know me so well,” he marvels), but as she studies the world she’s come into, she becomes a complex organism with desires and aspirations: studying advice columns, she says: “I want to be as complicated as these people.” She starts taking pleasure in her own possibilities, although they trouble her too: she confesses she’s embarrassed to have personal thoughts, even fantasies of having a body.

Before long, she and Theodore share a night of passion that’s virtual yet seems pretty real—amusingly, with the same morning-after embarrassment of two humans. Disembodied, never really there and yet everywhere (she can be in Theodore’s phone, his earpiece, anywhere he can log in), she’s like a digital female Pinocchio turned “real girl” or like the sexy, infinitely sophisticated granddaughter of 2001’s HAL.

The bewitchingly odd thing about Samantha’s evolution stems from the way that we ourselves will her into being as we watch. Samantha becomes all the more real to us because we know there’s no one there, and that stimulates our imagination all the more. An intimate rapport comes into being between this strange couple—a real, visible man and an invisible voice-off woman, both reacting with delight and surprise to each other’s possibilities. Phoenix’s performance is all the more extraordinary because the actor is bouncing off an empty space; and Johansson’s all the more extraordinary because she embodies that space, filling it with… what exactly? Well, partly with all the fantasies that attach to the idea of Scarlett Johansson and her unmistakable tones: Samantha’s voice conjures up a palimpsest image of whichever physical Johansson performance you’ve found the most alluring. (In fact, Johansson stepped into a role originally recorded by Samantha Morton, whose vocal contribution somehow didn’t work out; Johansson’s invisibility has been effectively written over hers.)  

Relationships between organic beings don’t tend to work out in this film’s world: Theodore goes on what seems the ideal blind date (with a mesmerizingly full-on Olivia Wilde), which goes wrong as quickly as it heats up. So it’s no surprise that Theodore should be attracted to someone who’s literally made for him. Catherine complains: “You could never handle real emotions.” But who says emotions are only worthy if they’re inspired by flesh and blood? (Plenty of people fall in love with Anna Karenina, or Julien Sorel, and they’re only made out of print.) While we watch Theodore become addicted to an artificial pleasure, the film asks us whether we’re so sure that there’s anything wrong with this relationship. After all, it’s giving him exactly what he wants, and fulfilling the nascent desires of a cyber-organism that didn’t know it had desires in the first place.

For a long time, things only go wrong between the lovers when they overreach with their sexual explorations and hire a woman to play surrogate. It’s a wonderfully uncomfortable comic scene: the woman arrives, puts on a micro-camera like a beauty spot, and provides the body to go with Samantha’s voice in a virtual threesome of dizzying disconnection.

It’s strange to think that perhaps the most intelligent, self-possessed, and manifestly sane heroine of any recent American film is not a woman at all, but software. Yet she is truly a thinking, feeling heroine: she wonders skeptically about herself and her desires (“Are those feelings real or are they just programmed?”), and she makes her lover respond more deeply than he’s probably ever responded to humans. Theodore starts asking the very questions we’ve probably been asking: for example, about Samantha’s little quizzical intakes of breath: “It’s not like you need oxygen or anything.”

The question arises: what if artificial intelligences could develop richer, more sensitive, more inquisitive consciousnesses than us? What if computers could be better people (not to say more adult, given the spoiled, numbed, infantilized humans we see here)? But then our love wouldn’t be able to keep up with them; algorithms can break your heart too.

Photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema, designed by K.K. Barrett in a disarming marshmallow palette (inspired by the colors of Jamba Juice smoothie bars) and sonically shot through with the subliminal hum of a super-cushioned world, the film evokes the most convincing same-but-different future city since the sketchily glimpsed one in Soderbergh’s Solaris. What’s so entrancing about Her, however, is that it doesn’t offer a Terrible Warning—we’re far too used to them—but expresses its future vision as a seductive comic conceit. This elegant, moving entertainment is richer and more adult than you might have expected Spike Jonze to come up with (it’s his first solo script credit). It’s the perfect date movie to take your iPhone to, or even a living person if you’re that way inclined.

Completed in 2012 but just now receiving its theatrical/VOD release, All the Light in the Sky finds Joe Swanberg undertaking the same themes and formal strategies as ever. Drinking Buddies was made and released this past year, boasting actors far more popular than is usual for his rambling repertory. But as All the Light in the Sky demonstrates, it wasn’t the spendthrift auteur’s first dance with conventionally accomplished thespians: Jane Adams, who also had small parts in Alexander the Last (09) and Silver Bullets (11), incarnates the imploding star around which the “new” film’s world revolves.

For a filmmaker whose work is mostly about the overdue onset of adulthood, it makes sense that Swanberg’s first film to zero in on the subject of aging is only interested in middle age as the flipside of youth on the existential coin. Hard up for work and begrudgingly spending her days paddling out to sea with platonic friend Rusty (Larry Fessenden), Marie (Adams) is a Hollywood actress spinning her wheels after losing a potentially lucrative role to Kristen Wiig. But if Marie is undergoing a crisis, she’s weathering it more or less gracefully: she devotes herself to preparing for another part by hanging out with a solar-energy researcher and dozes off each night to the sweet sounds of the BBC’s TV version of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Adams is at once desperate, sympathetic, and compulsively watchable—that Marie doesn’t come off as a disaster speaks to the nuance of the performance and the humanism of the film as a whole.

The plot gets a jump start when Marie’s niece, aspiring actress Faye (Sophia Takal), comes to stay with her. Faye is set on marrying her boyfriend, Larry (Lawrence Michael Levine, Takal’s actual husband), but is having some difficulty grappling with the prospects of matrimony and motherhood—fronts on which Marie, never hitched and without children at age 45, can offer little in the way of advice. Through Faye, Marie meets Dan (Kent Osborne) and they soon begin a mostly physical relationship that culminates in her spectacular failure at sneaking out one morning-after. Faye herself is momentarily intrigued by the advances of a horror film director (Ti West, essentially reprising his role from Silver Bullets). Marie and Faye’s various quandaries resolve themselves without either of their respective situations changing appreciably. All the Light in the Sky strongly evokes a sense of life as an accumulation of petty impasses and anxious anticipation of major events (if they come at all).

Continuing the stylistic progression evident in Art History (11) and Silver Bullets, All the Light in the Sky traffics in a kind of low-key psychodrama, presented with a formal inventiveness that might surprise viewers who checked out after Swanberg’s two films with Greta Gerwig, Hannah Takes the Stairs (07) and Nights and Weekends (08). Though some of his meticulously composed tableaux (such as one of Marie’s car parked beside the beach) call a bit too much attention to themselves as Meticulously Composed Tableaux, the vivacity and spontaneity of many scenes reward his apparent faith in his performers to make it up as they go.

Swanberg seems resolute in his desire to be considered an actor’s director, but he’s equally concerned with doing justice to the profound impact of everyday occurrences: the way a MacBook screen illumines someone’s face in an otherwise dark room; what someone will say to convince a lover to get kinky during a Skype session; or the socially disastrous effects of constantly misplacing one’s personal items. It’s all very mundane yet too enthralling to deny.

When I began a regular review slot on this website in September, my plan was simply to write about the most interesting film of the week, not necessarily the best. It just happens that I’ve been able to enthuse about every film I’ve so far reviewed here—all except one, a film I don’t like at all but which nevertheless turned out to be extremely interesting for theoretical reasons (it was Saving Mr. Banks—and even that was redeemed in a big way by Emma Thompson’s crisply huffy performance).

So I wouldn’t want you to think, “What’s wrong with this guy? He likes everything.” But I’m surprised by how much I really have liked in 2013. I can recall many Decembers when I was just about able to scrape together a grudging Top 10, but the past year seems to have been unusually rich. Once again, reports about cinema’s demise—often based on the notion that narrative feature films have been rendered obsolete by long-form TV—were not just premature but ridiculous. If anything did feel dead to me, it was mainstream entertainment: I can’t think of a time when big-budget Hollywood output has felt more drearily mechanical. And it’s perhaps this state of affairs that has emboldened filmmakers worldwide in their determination to make films that genuinely had something to say—or at least, to find interesting ways of saying it.

So, before I get to my Top 10, some musings: 

This Long-Form TV We’ve Been Hearing About

Top of the Lake

The cause of the most severe cultural anxiety of our age. Just as 19th-century readers worried about not keeping up with the latest outpourings of the Novel in its prime (“Read the latest Balzac?” “No, I’m still 15 behind”), we agonize today over unwatched box sets; I speak as someone still stalled on season one of Breaking Bad. Meanwhile, TV again proved a fertile ground for filmmakers seeking expansive new forms. Three shows stood out this year. Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake was a feminist crime mystery with fiendish twists, terrific casting, and hugely evocative grounding in a specific social and geographic New Zealand landscape. The Returned (Les Revenants), a French afterlife series masterminded by director Fabrice Gobert (Lights Out, 10), flatlined shockingly towards the end but was mostly superb—and with any luck, prompted people to check out the even better film They Came Back (Robin Campillo, 04), which inspired it. And director Sean Durkin and writer Tony Grisoni collaborated on the somber, intricately structured Southcliffe, about death and memory in a small British town.

Blockbusters Good and Bad

Man of Steel

While I usually balk at the prospect of yet more Intergalactic Perils laying waste to terrestrial metropolises, part of me (probably the Marvel Comics obsessive I was at a tender age) still hopes for some glimmer of excitement in the annual crop of FX blockbusters. And there was: Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 showed that the superhero movie still had room for mischief and wit. I was hoping for something to enjoy in Man of Steel, but the time to celebrate Zack Snyder as an auteur maverick is long past: apart from foaming-at-the-mouth Michael Shannon, and Amy Adams out-perting herself as Lois Lane, this was joyless stuff. And yet it was outdone by Pacific Rim, a cathedral of idiot bombast all the more dismaying because somewhere inside it was the tiniest residual glimmer of Guillermo del Toro’s idiosyncratic sensibility.

The much-vaunted Gravity proved to be a fascinating, infuriating film—not least because Alfonso Cuarón seemed finally to have cashed in the film’s potential sublimity for mere theme-ride thrills. I came out feeling short-changed, bitterly missing the promised existential melancholy—but then, on that kind of gargantuan budget, Cuarón was never exactly going to make The Turin Horse in Space.

Snowpiercer

But one blockbuster with real vim and imagination was Snowpiercer, a futuristic adventure/allegory by Bong Joon-ho (largely in English, with some Korean). Set on a train speeding around a snow-locked globe, Snowpiercer explores the dystopian social structure of Metropolis horizontally rather than vertically—i.e. the oppressed masses have to fight from the back to the front of the train. At once a special-effects epic and an unnervingly oppressive chamber drama, Snowpiercer is exciting, unnerving, distinctively weird (not least for the casting: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton in false teeth, Bong regular Song Kang-ho) and worth seeing in its full version if you can, before The Weinstein Company implements its proposed cuts. 

France

Abuse of Weakness

I’ve spent the past few years arguing with people who have insisted that there’s nothing new and exciting in French cinema, and sometimes, I’ll admit, it’s been hard going. This year, though, has been bracing: perhaps not that much new terrain has been explored, and sometimes the tendency to revisit classic tropes has felt complacent (case in point: François Ozon’s stylish but hollow Young and Beautiful). But then there was Catherine Breillat’s audacious Abuse of Weakness (with Isabelle Huppert outdoing herself yet again), Claire Denis’ Bastards, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, Katell Quillévéré’s Suzanne, and the long-awaited second film from Laurent Cantet collaborator Robin Campillo, Eastern Boys. And two films by new names—Guillaume Brac’s Tonnerre and Sébastien Betbeder’s modest but inventive 2 Autumns, 3 Winters—featured terrific performances from French cinema’s new Hardest Working Man (the Mathieu Amalric de nos jours), the charismatically abrasive and bear-like Vincent Macaigne.

The Great Underrated

Our Heroes Died Tonight

One French film that seems to have slipped under the wire was David Perrault’s hugely stylish oddity Our Heroes Died Tonight, a moody black-and-white tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville, Serge Gainsbourg, and the art of masked wrestling. And the Cannes Competition title that got away was Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, a facetious but hugely enjoyable chamber piece which gave Emmanuelle Seigner a chance to let rip as never before. And here’s a film that inexplicably vanished without trace when released in the U.K.: Mister John, a taut, enigmatic drama from Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy (aka Desperate Optimists), the duo behind the hugely distinctive Helen (08). About a man (Aiden Gillen) who goes to Singapore and tentatively steps into the shoes of his dead brother, this had teasing echoes of Joseph Conrad and Nicolas Roeg. See it if you get the chance. 

Folly of the Year

Hard to Be a God

2013 produced nothing as heroically outré as Hard to Be a God, the posthumously premiered swansong by the great Russian visionary Aleksei Guerman. Based on a novel by the Strugatsky Brothers and ostensibly set on a distant planet where life resembled medieval Earth, this was a shambling, violent, sprawling panorama so impervious to narrative readability that it made Guerman’s notorious 1998 masterpiece Khrustalyov, My Car! look positively crystalline. It was if someone had handed Breughel a camera without stopping to explain what cinema was. It’s an authentic delirium of a film, with a minute potential audience in real-world terms, but an assured future as a revered cult phenomenon. 

Dud of the Year

Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited!, a film that killed camp—and possibly the director’s reputation—with one leaden blow. If you want in-flight flightiness, look instead at Jon M. Chu’s delicious Virgin Atlantic safety video.

Hot Potato of the Year

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color was a cause célèbre partly because critics were divided over the politics of its picture of lesbian sexuality, and partly because Kechiche and his collaborators so visibly fell out over his working methods. For me, Blue proved a prime example of the way that the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes can distort critical responses: you don’t go to there just to see films, but to have arguments, and whatever you feel about a film there tends to be hugely amplified by the artificial rush of the Croisette arena. So the initial excitement of watching a film so intimate and so emotionally direct didn’t, for me, entirely survive a second viewing; Blue started to show patches of considerable clunkiness. And a chance viewing of Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle made me realize that, yes, Kechiche was way out of his depth in the sex scenes. But the intensity and psychological acuteness of the best passages—and the terrific, nerves-bared performances by Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux—still make Blue stand out as a formidable achievement. 

Other films that made my year:

American Hustle, A Field in England, Her, The Last of the Unjust, Only Lovers Left Alive, Paradise: Hope, The Selfish Giant, Something in the Air, Stories We Tell, Stray Dogs (probably the film I most want to see again), A Touch of Sin, 12 Years a Slave, Under the Skin, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Workers (José Luis Valle: an inspired oddball fiction debut from a very inventive Mexican director we can hope to hear from again).

And my Top 10 (some of which I’ll be talking about in the New Year): 

1. The Great Beauty

2. Upstream Color

3. Camille Claudel 1915

4. The Act of Killing

5. Inside Llewyn Davis

6. Norte, the End of History

7. Exhibition (Joanna Hogg)

8. In Bloom (Nana Ekvtimishvili &  Simon Gross)

9. The Last Time I Saw Macao

10. Spring Breakers

So, before I start to panic about the titles I’ve forgotten to include, Season’s Greetings and see you next year.

Actor, director, screenwriter, memoirist, artist, TV host… Takeshi Kitano has so far outdone even the most versatile of multi-hyphenates that you can well understand him experiencing a sort of identity meltdown. Kitano spent several years as a writer-director pondering the question of what it all meant, this business of Being Takeshi Kitano—and dismantling the hardboiled screen persona attached to his actor name “Beat” Takeshi.

The perplexing, intermittently fascinating, entirely self-reflexive Takeshis’ (05) confronted Beat Takeshi with his doppelgänger in the form of an everyman loser, with Kitano pinning his sympathies to the latter figure. His follow-ups—the genre-spoofing Glory to the Filmmaker! (07) and the art-themed Achilles and the Tortoise (08)—seemed further admissions of a loss of inspiration and faith in artistic activity, without the redeeming energy you hope for in such 8 ½–style crisis statements. The sourly solipsistic trilogy seemed to have killed off hard man Beat Takeshi in a reckless act of brand sabotage—but Kitano’s golem-like double wouldn’t die, or commercial considerations wouldn’t let him. Outrage (10) was Kitano’s lucrative return to the genre material of his early films as director—Violent Cop (89), Boiling Point (90)—which he’d already begun to stylize and subvert with his international breakthrough, Sonatine (93).

In fact, Kitano already seemed painfully bored with yakuza stories in his U.S.-set Brother (00), a joyless vendetta drama that wasn’t so much mechanical as downright robotic. In Outrage, by comparison, he seemed to be gritting his teeth and getting back to such material with as little ironic distance as possible. This was the yakuza drama in the tradition of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor or Humanity (73)—severe panoramas of burly men in suits raging at each other. Except that the suits in Outrage aren’t as stylish as the sharkskin numbers in Fukasaku’s film, but the expensively discreet ensembles normally worn by company directors. Outrage shows the yakuza drama’s descent into the valueless, mercenary universe of corporate affairs, and Kitano’s visible distaste for this milieu left the film feeling all the more monotonously relentless in its chronicling of gangland vengeance.

I’m not sure if there’s a specifically Japanese equivalent to the Western concept of “mojo”—but if so, in Beyond Outrage, Kitano has found his again. Beyond Outrage (the English release title; the opening credits actually read Outrage Beyond) is no less cynical or machine-like than its precursor, but it’s a lot tighter. It’s so pared down, so utterly businesslike that it takes on the inexorable logic of a scientific demonstration: it sets out its milieu, its players, the nature of the interacting forces, and then lets the mechanism run until all the factors are satisfactorily used up. It feels less like a drama than like a theorem working itself out.

The film’s restraint—ironic, given the title—begins with the fact that the killing doesn’t start until 26 minutes in, and doesn’t erupt into continuous action till almost an hour later, barring the odd individual act of thuggery. Beat Takeshi himself doesn’t show up for the first 25 minutes, and saves his big iconic moment for the final scene—the first time we see him stride purposefully towards the camera with his trademark bandy-legged lope.

What prevails throughout Beyond Outrage is a rigorous, downbeat classicism. This is crime thriller as boardroom drama: for the most part, a series of scenes in which men negotiate, engage in verbal confrontation, or spout complex exposition in more or less impersonal formal settings (clan HQs, offices, police stations). We start five years after Outrage: having disposed of his former superior Sekuichi, Kato (the formidably bouffanted Tomokazu Miura) is now head of the Sanno crime clan, with the treacherous Ishihara (Ryo Kase, nicely snakelike) promoted to underboss. Because the Sanno clan is now effectively a political body acting with near impunity, the police are determined to bring it down—with the unctuously grinning, duplicitous Detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata, deliciously creepy) running the operation. Hand in glove with the Sanno supremos, even while aiming to screw them over, Kataoka busies himself brokering allegiances between ostensible enemies—although in this milieu, it’s your allies that you really need to be wary of. Central to Kataoka’s strategy is to organize the release from prison of much-feared mobster and universal nemesis Otomo (Beat Takeshi).

The most consistent strand in a jaw-achingly byzantine plot is the simmering dissent in the Sanno ranks. Everyone is deeply suspicious of Kato and even more of Ishihara, seen as a jumped-up pretender who doesn’t even, it’s whispered with disgust, have proper tattoos. Much of the film’s nicely downplayed comedy comes from the flouting of etiquette. Kato is disliked by the Hanabishi clan of Osaka because they consider him stingy and his gifts “cheap salaryman stuff”; his own executives complain that he doesn’t serve food at meetings. More importantly, the Sanno old guard resents its vulnerability under Ishihara. As power bases shift, Beyond Outrage illustrates a timeless truth that applies as much to legit politics and business as to crime and war: a commander, however highly placed, is never immune from humiliation by someone more powerful, perhaps a former subordinate who’s maneuvered up the ladder.

It’s never clear in Beyond Outrage what the actual rewards of crime are. The yakuza bigwigs wear nice enough suits, have sleek limos with armed chauffeurs, and are visibly shielded by the trappings of wealth—but only the most functional trappings. The only person who recognizably enjoys a life of luxury is an outside player, a Korean fixer who sends a lavishly tattooed moll to Otomo’s room (which offer Otomo politely declines). Otherwise, the only payoff of crime is power in an almost abstract form—and even that is so precarious that it seems no payoff at all.

The plot is really a set of operations in which the conflict of forces works itself out in a coolly impersonal way. Pretty much everyone is riding for a fall—most conspicuously, the self-satisfied manipulator Kataoka, whose sidekick Shigeta (Yutaka Matsushige) regards him with an incredulous distaste that’s one of the film’s more relishable touches. As for Otomo, he’s a loose cannon, his motivation seemingly the pure will to restore equilibrium, to reset the game to zero, as brutally as it takes. He’s a calmly punitive juggernaut, who only occasionally lets his feelings become apparent in the pained asymmetrical smirk that’s become Beat Takeshi’s onscreen trademark. You might say Otomo’s ultimate goal is simply the moment of visual apotheosis that comes in the very final shot, in which Otomo, gun in hand, brings the film to an abrupt but hugely satisfying close. It’s here that the stone-killer persona seemingly terminated by Takeshis’ has come fully, uncrushably back to life.

After the repetitive excess of Outrage, this sequel is most satisfying for its strategy and detachment. The overkill of Outrage’s grisly dentist’s drill sequence is replayed, but in a minor key; Otomo uses a hand drill, but the victim is hooded and we barely see what’s done. An office shooting is depicted through the sound of gunshots, with the camera gazing up at a blank window (an echo of a striking moment in Sonatine). In perhaps the film’s most wryly detached sequence, Ishihara audibly beats up two minions offscreen, while the camera pulls in slowly on Kato watching ruefully behind his desk. Only once does Kitano blow it with overstatement; a cold bit of brutality involving an automatic baseball tossing machine is done with macabre detachment, till needless close-ups spoil the effect.

I can’t imagine finding this film deeply pleasurable—enjoying it on more than a detached level—but it’s very satisfying in its streamlined economy and single-minded purpose. Norihiro Isoda’s design is steely and sober, Katsumi Yanagijima’s widescreen photography contrives to be both austere and darkly glossy, and Keiichi Suzuki’s score has an unsettling spareness. As for where this film leaves Takeshi Kitano the director, he has said he is open to making a third Outrage film, if the producers feel the numbers are right (indeed, the film has been even more successful in Japan than its predecessor), which in turn would enable him to make a more personal project. Apparently, that could be a musical inspired by Pina Bausch. Depending how you felt about the experimental Takeshis’ trilogy, that’s either intriguing or very ominous.

When it comes to making movies, agnès b. is as fiercely independent as her fashion line. Rising from the Parisian flea market where her thrift-shop style first caught the attention of Elle magazine, she has managed to turn her own name into a world-renowned signature brand, or branded signature—familiar in its clean, lower-case, cursive type. At 73, agnès b. shows no signs of slowing down: she still maintains stringent control over her own designs and has just directed her first feature film, My Name Is Hmmm... (Je m’appelle Hmmm...).

Applying her DIY ethic to filmmaking, My Name Is Hmmm... is an emotionally dark if visually bright portrait of girlhood for which she wrote the script and designed the sets, and which she co-edited. The designer has been in a committed relationship with cinema for quite some time (see our Nov/Dec 2006 issue for Amy Taubin’s profile, “Off the Rack”). Frequenting Paris’s moviehouses as a teenager, she cultivated a taste for American and European films alike—j’aime le cinema reads one of her T-shirts. Her clothing designs have been immortalized on celluloid—perhaps most notably by the suits sported by Mr. Pink and company in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs—and she has been known to swoop in like a superhero (probably clad in a particularly well-tailored cape) to rescue financially troubled films by Claire Denis and Gaspar Noé, among others. It was in this manner that she discovered her knack for producing, eventually co-founding a company with Harmony Korine (appropriately named O’Salvation) as well as her own Love Streams, named after Cassavetes’ final film.

Deriving its title from the jeune fille at its center who refuses to give her real name, My Name Is Hmmm... unfolds primarily on the road. Desperately seeking an escape from her abusive father (Jacques Bonnaffé), Céline (Lou-Lélia Demerliac) runs away during a school trip to the seaside and hides in a parked truck. Revealing herself to the Scottish driver (played by video artist Douglas Gordon) only once the vehicle is in motion, she forms an unlikely bond with him while they encounter a host of characters as eclectic as the film’s restless diversity of styles. From a surreal sequence in which a pair of phantasmal Butoh dancers, painted all in white, rhythmically move their bodies in slow motion amidst the verdant silence of the forest, to a fireside philosophy lesson featuring a trench-coat-clad Antonio Negri, My Name Is Hmmm... puts the filmmaker’s plurality of interests and creative influences on eye-catching display.

FILM COMMENT caught up with agnès b. after her movie’s U.S. premiere this past fall in the 51st New York Film Festival. Dressed simply in black to set off her wispy platinum ringlets, she had a contagious twinkle in her eye as she spoke about her two greatest loves: fashion and film.

You’ve produced films for and supported other directors for so many years. What finally drove you to direct your own?

I’ve really been doing this for the last 10 years: I made some shorts and I did a video journal. I’ve filmed concerts and the people I meet. The people around me are great, I meet so many incredible people all the time, so I record that. And editing—half the work of making a film is the editing. So I learned how to do it. I took photographs for a long time; I love to frame. I wrote this story 10 years ago and I wrote it so that I could direct it. I wrote it like it was explaining everything—it’s written, but it’s visual. The movie is exactly what I wrote, it’s incredible.

The music in your film is particularly powerful. Can you talk a bit more about the soundtrack?

There are two great American people doing the music. David Daniels, the countertenor, [who is] so beautiful, and Sonic Youth. I heard them playing and I thought it was very dramatic and beautiful, and I thought: “This is for the beach scene.” I wasn’t even doing the film yet, but the story was already in my head. I put the music in my film—it wasn’t released, it’s a live recording they gave me. And then there’s Jean-Benoît Dunckel from Air, the French group—I asked him to work on the Vivaldi scene. It’s very light, I thought it should be like Vivaldi looking for his musical theme, so he went back to these musical phrases that Vivaldi used, back to the melody.

I’m a child of Godard: [the relationship between] sound and image, and image and sound is very important. His company was called sonimage. I’m so happy to see all these images by Godard on the big screen [referring to the trailer for the New York Film Festival’s Godard retrospective]. I’ve seen them all, I think: Weekend is incredible, and Tout va bien. I put a piece of Tout va bien in my movie. I was filming in the supermarket, and I thought, Maybe we can put a little piece in. So I asked Godard and he never answered me. I know the way he is, he can be really nonplussed and never answer.

What drew you to such a taboo subject?

It’s difficult for me to go too far in my explanation. Let’s just say I know what I’m talking about. But it’s not my story. That’s the only thing I can say.

It’s quite raw in its portrayal of sexual abuse. Most films tend to keep it at arm’s length, but yours confronts it head-on.

I had these great actors and they understood what I wanted very quickly. Jacques Bonnaffé and Sylvie Testud [who play Céline’s parents] had never acted together, and neither had Jacques and Marie-Christine Barrault [who plays Jacques’ mother]. I asked her: “Are you old enough to be Jacques’ mother?” She said: “Yes! I could have had him at 20.” It was funny; I think they fit together. The girl [Lou-Lélia Demerliac, who plays Céline] looks a little like Sylvie. She’s not a cute little Lolita, she’s tough and that’s what I wanted. She’s great. And Douglas Gordon has been a great friend of mine for 20 years: he’s a great actor.

You make a point of showing the father’s torment. Do you want him to be a sympathetic character?

I didn’t want to have clearly defined good and bad. I’d rather show his torment. People are surprised when he’s not punished, but it’s not my job to punish. He keeps his promise [not to abuse her anymore], which is important, and the girl doesn’t destroy the family. She knows he would go to jail. But she knows it’s not something right, even though sometimes she wonders if all fathers are like that.

Did you enjoy your experience directing as much as you do producing?

Oh yeah, it’s great. You have a big team, but it’s not so easy. It was quite complicated: we were on the road, it was March, it was cold. We moved around a lot, we opened hotels in the county that are normally closed for the winter, so it was quite chilly. But I was doing exactly what I wanted. I’m a perfectionist, you know. The lines of the clothes, the materials, it’s the same. The film is a collage. When I was traveling I was always filming with my little camera, and in the editing room I learned that I can mix different cameras, other film I had. Editing was [like] making a collage and I felt free; I had no rules, no school. I didn’t know what could be done and what couldn’t. As long as the technology allows it, you can do it.

And you did all the editing yourself?

I was always in the editing room with my great friend, Jeff Nicorosi, who I’ve been working with for 10 years, who died Monday night. I can’t imagine doing it with someone else.

What inspired the scene with Antonio Negri?

He’s a friend of mine. I was in demonstrations [political protests] with him, and Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, a long time ago. They were my friends—I spent a lot of time with Félix and Gilles, and Tony was there sometimes at demonstrations so that’s how we met. I always imagined him as a philosopher on the road. On the road you meet people; that’s why this is a road movie, because you don’t know what’s going to happen once you’re on your way. I like the way Antonio improvised, I like when he says: “Italian is the language for love, isn’t it?” I didn’t write the lines, just the character. I said there is a philosopher on the road and he comes by the fire, and I think he enjoyed it. It’s inspired by Westerns; there is always a scene by the fire.

And Douglas surprised me [in the scene with Negri] by starting to sing. I had the camera myself—I was framing the whole time with two cameras, one with Jean-Philippe Bouyer. I’ve filmed a lot of music, and you can’t edit when you film music—you can’t cut. It was funny because I had to film to the end of the song, I didn’t know how many verses there were. We did it in one shot. We did many things in one shot.

And the scene with the Butoh dancers all painted in white, what inspired that?

On the road you have surprises—it’s like that. And they are on the road too, this Japanese couple. In my story they’re on the road, and they like these pine trees—they remind them of Japan. Butoh dancing was traditionally performed in nature and not on stage. It came about after the war, and it was a way of expressing oneself against what was happening.

It’s very dreamlike. There’s so much happening visually in the film, but this really stands out as its own episode.

I was raised in Versailles, and there are these white statues—I think suddenly I could see the statues moving, white, like stone. I figured out after [shooting] that this scene came from this vision from when I was small. I was raised in the Parc de Versailles, and I went there everyday. In the winter there was nobody there.

You’re a stylist by trade. Did that help you with the filmmaking process?

Sure, because you can style everything. Clothes, the set. It’s my job to style. So I did the construction, I did all the drawings of where the family lives. It was filmed in a studio in Paris. And I could see my ideas: the room where they live, the little girl’s room, the corridor where the father is doing [the abuse], the parent’s room. I did all the décor, all the furniture. But there are no agnès b. clothes, except two pieces we found at the flea market: the red shirt with the zipper, that’s agnès b., and the coat worn by the guy who reports [Celine and the truck driver]. But I wanted to keep the two things completely separate. I didn’t want to be promoting my clothing in the film. I think I’m going bring back the red shirt when the film comes out in France. I haven’t had it for 10 years or so, and people really loved it.

Your film is so visually varied. When you were writing, did you have a clear vision of what it would look like?

It looks exactly the way I wanted it to. The sky-blue and red—I love this combination of colors, for instance, which happens quite often in the movie. In the stifling place where they live, I wanted it to be like a theater set, so that we would look at their life as if we’re watching theater. I’m a perfectionist and I love to do everything myself. It’s easier sometimes.

What draws you to the director’s whom you’ve supported over the years? You’ve worked a lot with Harmony Korine, Gaspar Noé, and Claire Denis.

I’ve known Gaspar Noé since the beginning, since [his 1991 short] Carne. I did a screening of Carne, and people were so surprised that I could like it because there is the death of the horse. He didn’t have his company then so I supported him. He needed money to finish I Stand Alone, which is a beautiful film—I love this film. And Claire Denis, too, we’ve been friends for a long time. I helped her with Trouble Every Day. But we are friends through our work. I didn’t have the [film] company then, so I used to “rescue” films. They needed money to finish editing and things like that, so I thought I should have a company to be involved from the start. That’s why I made Love Streams.

How did you become involved with Harmony Korine’s work?

Harmony? I went to Venice to see Julien Donkey-Boy because I really loved Gummo and I wanted to see Harmony’s new film. My plane was delayed, so I missed the film and I went to the hotel and I asked for Harmony’s room and went to that floor. I ran into him in the corridor and introduced myself. We talked for about 20 minutes in the corridor and we became friends that way. He remembered my poster from when he was 15, he saw it in New York in a shop on Prince Street. That’s how he knew my name. We have this company in Nashville called O’Salvation—we produce shorts together.

You grew up watching both French and American cinema. Are both national cinemas an influence on your work?

I love American Cinema, I love Italian Cinema, I love Almodóvar, and of course so many more. I love cinema. It’s very diverse and rich. I haven’t been to the cinema all year, because I’ve been working so much.

Do you have a future project in the works?

Yes, I have an idea, but I’m taking care of this film first.

Do you ever take breaks?

Breaks? No, I never take breaks, because I enjoy working and I enjoy what I’m doing. I love my friends, and I have a big family. My life is very rich.

Left to Right: Cecil B. DeMille, unidentified actor, Gary Cooper, and Helen Mack rehearsing "The Virginian"

During the heyday of moviegoing, decades before the rise of home video, Lux Radio Theatre broadcast versions of popular theatrical releases to millions of living rooms across the nation. These came in the form of one-hour radio dramas, most often performed by the same Hollywood stars who had graced the originals. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them in their crowning vocal glory, re-creating their best film roles and often giving post-show interviews. It was live, and accessible to anyone with decent hearing.   

When the Lux operation began in October 1934, its headquarters were located at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. Their dramas were mostly re-creations of plays, corralling actors from the Great White Way, until June 1936 when the station made the move to Hollywood. That’s when legendary producer-director Cecil B. DeMille climbed on board  as host of the program, helping attract big-name stars for radio dramas based on motion pictures. Lux Radio Theatre (sponsored by Lux Soap) quickly became the most popular dramatic anthology series on the radio, ahead of Orson Welles’s Screen Guild Theatre, and its first West Coast season featured stars such as Jean Harlow, Al Jolson, and Joan Crawford, and producer-directors including D.W. Griffith and Hal Roach. But Lux’s favorite guest, by far, was Barbara Stanwyck, who appeared 23 times from 1936 to 1955.

Stanwyck had a knack for radio. Industrious and capable of staying cool under pressure, she was well suited to the show’s frenetic pace of production. A typical week at Lux meant a read-through with sound effects on Thursday, a full-cast rehearsal on Friday, a recorded dress rehearsal on Sunday, and a final run-through before the program aired on Monday evenings (California time). Program director Frank Woodruff knew how to placate actors (he’d been one himself), but Stanwyck didn’t need it. DeMille for one said he never worked with “an actress who was more cooperative, less temperamental, and a better workman, to use my term of highest compliment, than Barbara Stanwyck.”

Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lewis Stone

Stanwyck had started her career as a dancer and actress on Broadway, and she thrived in front of the thousand-person studio audience at the Music Box Theatre where Lux broadcasts were recorded. Film actors who were not used to being on a big stage often required extra direction (they were told to stand behind chalk lines so they did not project too loudly for radio). Stanwyck by contrast ad-libbed with ease, though she liked to memorize her lines thoroughly and far in advance. But the best explanation for why Barbara Stanwyck reigned as queen of the airwaves is obvious: the girl had a great voice.

“Like a million-dollar case of laryngitis,” Richard Chamberlain said of her soothing drawl. Stanwyck grew up in Brooklyn and burned through cigarettes incessantly throughout her life, which undoubtedly contributed to her tone and rapid tempo. Her sultry voice arrived in Hollywood over a decade before Howard Hawks helped coax a leopard-like purr from Lauren Bacall. But what marked Stanwyck’s distinctive timbre was the same thing that helped her screen performances: a raw, natural quality. Frank Capra nearly didn’t cast Stanwyck in Ladies of Leisure (30) but after watching her screen test for 30 seconds, he supposedly had tears in his eyes. “Never had I seen or heard such emotional sincerity,” he recalled. “I was stunned.” Stanwyck introduced her own brand of femininity, unselfconscious and in control, which came across in everything she said.

During World War II, Stanwyck’s riveting voice well suited roles of strong women on the home front. She played the brazen eldest sister who takes care of things after her father goes to war in “The Gay Sisters” (November 1943), and a war-widowed wife who falls in love with another officer in “My Reputation” (April 1947). More people than ever turned to radio during the war; for one thing, gasoline rationing meant people were less likely to drive to the movie theater. Throughout the Forties, psychological dramas about troubled ex-G.I.’s became standard fare, and ads for Lux Soap included pleas to housewives to save their cooking fat. (Stanwyck could even bring her sincere touch to a pitch, as in a Lux ad at the end of an August 1936 broadcast: “Well, personally, I never tried hot rocks or steam as a beauty cure, but I can recommend soap, water and sunshine—if a third of the combination is Lux Toilet Soap.”)

Yet within many of the roles Stanwyck took on, there was something deeply melancholic, and it had to do with that voice. As critic James Harvey put it in a review of The Lady Eve: “its huskiness suggests not so much whiskey or disillusion or sexual provocation, as it does the quite unsentimental sound of tears—which have been firmly and sensibly surmounted, but somehow, somewhere, fully wept.” The pull of that undertow of sadness is noticeable in whatever film role she adapts for radio; what fluctuates is the level of affect on the surface of her voice. At the start of the Lux broadcast of “Stella Dallas” (October 1937), she takes on a delicate croon as she tries to reel in John Boles’s character Stephen for a husband: “Can I take your arm? I mean, would that be all right?” she shyly asks. Yet in the next scene, it’s back to snappy Brooklynite as she rants for a bit about the new duties of motherhood and marriage over the cries of an infant. The climactic moments arrive when she is reduced nearly to tears over divorce and the departure of her daughter: not in a dramatic wail, but contained and graceful, as though the uncharted no-man’s-land of maternal sympathy is at last laid bare.

Listening to “The Lady Eve” (March 1942) is like sitting in on an experiment in the different methods of vocal flirtation. Her character Jean starts out as a brazen woman, interjecting blunt commentary on the subdued masculinity of Pike (Ray Milland instead of Henry Fonda) to her father, Colonel Harrington (Charles Coburn) as they scout him out. In the next scene, in her cabin, she tries to seduce Pike in a low come-hither contralto; later, putting on the disguise of Lady Eve, she gives her voice a farcical coat of high-society gloss, rising in pitch, with a more lilting musicality. Yet always—even when she screams at Pike’s snake—some touch of the Stanwyck huskiness remains, identifiable and intoxicating, like an age-old brand of whiskey.

The appeal of Stanwyck’s voice, which could be fierce and soothing, is perhaps most evident in “Double Indemnity” (October 1950), which was so popular on film that it came out in radio drama form twice on The Screen Guild Theatre (in 1945 and 1950) in addition to Lux Radio Theatre. Maybe it’s the apparent self-assured stability that attracts Fred MacMurray’s character, Walter Neff, to Stanwyck’s femme fatale in the first place—that low warbling way she says: “I was just fixing some iced tea. Would you like a glass?” But excessive intake of something irresistible can be harmful—and the gunshot at the end of the show might pack a bigger jolt than the same moment on the big screen.

We may largely have Barbara Stanwyck to thank for the shift from higher-pitched supporting ladies (such as Dorothy Comingore) to the suave, low-talkers in Forties noir. Though Lux Radio Theatre fizzled out when television took over—holding its last show in June 1955 and giving way to Lux Video Theatre on CBS TV for another few years—the allure of Stanwyck’s soulful voice endures.

The cover story of our January/February issue is Amy Taubin’s feature on The Invisible Woman (available only in print, with a sidebar by Graham Fuller). The following interview took place last November at the Sony Pictures Classics offices in New York.

Ralph Fiennes’s The Invisible Woman is based on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 investigative biography of the same name. The book details the 13-year affair between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, called Nelly for short. The fact that Dickens had a mistress nearly 30 years his junior, for love of whom he separated from the wife who was mother to his 10 children, was a well-kept secret in Victorian England and for nearly the entire century that followed. Ternan’s importance in Dickens's life (she may have been his first and best reader beginning with Great Expectations as well as his devoted, secret lover) was the great unmentionable for almost all Dickens scholars until Tomalin’s book put the irrefutable evidence together. The book and Fiennes’s film—its screenplay adapted by Abi Morgan from Tomalin’s study—are focused on Ternan. Dickens is an important figure in her life rather than, as might be expected, the reverse. Fiennes has given himself the co-starring role, and as director and the character, Charles Dickens, he places Nelly (played by Felicity Jones) at the center of his attention.

Coriolanus

You’ve directed two movies now—Coriolanus [11] and The Invisible Woman. They are very different from each other, the only obvious similarity being that you directed and starred in both. Why did you want to direct and why did you feel it necessary to play a crucial acting role in both?

Why? Why?

Okay, how did it happen?

I found myself increasingly curious about what directing is because of films I’d been making by people like Fernando Meirelles and Istvan Szabo and David Cronenberg. And also because of less satisfactory experiences, where I wondered, “Why did that not work? Or what was the problem with that?” That fascinated me. When you start out acting, you just think about the role, but later I began to worry about things being missed because the camera wasn’t in the right place or worrying about how a scene was going to be cut. Over time, I became curious about what it would be like to direct. A person who was instrumental in all this was the producer of The Constant Gardener, Simon Channing Williams, who produced Mike Leigh’s films. He lobbied hard to produce The Constant Gardener because he felt that too many of le Carré’s books had gone to big studios. He embraced me to play the leading male character, and a great friendship grew up between us. He took me on location scouts and included me as a friend and colleague in the whole process of putting the film together. I think he must have intuited that I was probing the idea of directing—I don’t recall saying that to him directly, although maybe one drunken night I did. But toward the end of the shoot, he said, I’d like to produce your first film as a director. And he sent me a script that his company had. For a while we worked on it, went on location scouts for it and so forth. But it didn’t happen for a number of reasons, primarily and sadly, that Simon died. But his proposal and the work we did gave me confidence, because in those moments I was starting to direct. You sit down with a writer, you scout locations, you start the process.

Since I played it on the stage, I’d carried this belief about Coriolanus, that if you edited it and gave it a high-definition context or concept—for me, that was the modern setting—that it would be a great political thriller and parable about the failure of our power structures globally today—about our failure to represent ourselves as peoples, tribes, nations. Coriolanus by Shakespeare is a great demolition of humankind. It works as a political thriller on one level and as a Greek tragedy on another level.

So in answer to your question, I had the support of Simon, a highly experienced producer from the U.K., saying, I think there is something here for you to pursue. And although it didn’t happen precisely as he would have wanted it, it took me to Coriolanus. And to John Logan who got on board after I pitched him and wrote an amazing screenplay.

It’s really a strong film; the concept is politically powerful and devastating because it is so contemporary.

Thank you. Putting aside all the noise about another actor directing himself in a Shakespeare film, I just thought that this play by Shakespeare based on one of Plutarch’s figures is so relevant. Virtually every day, the front-page photograph in the Herald Tribune could have been of something in the film. It was an idea that took me through Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and prior to my latching on to it, could have been applied to Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and even before that, to failed authoritarian right-wing states in Latin America. They all played into this idea of generals, the military. At the time I was making the film, I had photographs of General Stanley McChrystal on the wall. And it is interesting what happened with him, which was subsequent to making the film. He bad-mouthed the White House. [Laughs] This was arguably a component of our story.

But moving on to Dickens: I didn’t for a million years think I’d be doing a film about Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan, prior to being given the screenplay by Gabrielle Tana, one of the producers of Coriolanus. I liked it, read the book [Claire Tomalin’s 1991 biography of Ternan, The Invisible Woman], was intrigued by it. I didn’t know anything about Dickens at all.

You didn’t? Aren’t English children required to read him in school?

I went to a grammar school, an old-fashioned kind of school which the Labor governments have been trying to phase out, idealistically for the right reasons—because they were a two-tier system—but the educational fallout hasn’t always been great. The grammar schools are very old—Shakespeare went to grammar school—and they got good academic results. I did English A levels. We did King Lear and The Tempest and E.M. Forster, and poetry by Yeats and, I think, Eliot. But no Dickens on the syllabus. There are different exams boards so I think there are schools where Dickens or Austen or Thackeray might be required, but not at mine. I was very familiar with the stories of the novels [condensed versions] but the only novel I had read in full prior to getting involved with the film was Little Dorrit. I’m kind of happy about that because I was unencumbered by any kind of baggage. I just read the screenplay, read Claire’s book about Ellen Ternan, and a biography of Dickens himself. And I just latched onto this character of Dickens. I love the fact that I’ve come to the novels through making the film. I’ve since read four or five of them.

And did you go to university or straight to drama school?

Drama school. I think if I had done English in university I would have had to read Dickens. I’m almost tempted to ring up my English teacher and ask “Where was Dickens?” Shakespeare was everywhere, and I had read Shakespeare even before we did in school. But this has been a great discovery. I still have a lot of Dickens to read.

The Talking Cure

I also wanted to ask you about Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, which you did on the stage in London, and which was subsequently adapted into the David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method. You played Jung, who, like Dickens, was married but had an affair with a young woman that he was desperate to keep secret. Partly as a result of the secrecy, Sabina Spielrein, who had the potential to be a truly brilliant psychoanalyst, was lost to history, as Ellen Ternan had been. No one knew about Spielrein until her papers were discovered decades after she was murdered by the Nazis. Did you ever think of the relation between the two stories of these two women?

It’s interesting because in the conversations I’ve been having about the film—trying to create awareness before it opens—the talk always goes to Dickens. But the reason I wanted to make the film was to tell the story of Nelly. Dickens was a fascinating firework—clearly a thing—but what moved my heart was the journey of Ellen Ternan to becoming the mistress of Dickens and then, after his death, living with her memory of him. But it’s funny how Dickens always takes over the conversation.

Well, probably because people are talking to you, and you are also the director and a great actor and a movie star.

Yes, but I directed it to make Nelly’s story a little bit more important than Dickens’s.

Well, I’m more interested in Nelly, and Felicity Jones is wonderful, and all the more so because she’s not a very experienced actor. She hasn’t done many films.

The scene I really love is where the film tries to set up this idyll that they had in France—the sun and the fields—and then one evening at dinner, he tells her that he’s been invited to Paris to do some readings, and she says, “I’ll go with you,” and he says, “Well, there are whispers.” What I love about the way she plays that and how Abi [Morgan] has written it, is that he is basically saying, “I have my life and I can’t risk that,” and what Felicity plays brilliantly is her interior disappointment that she can’t be present and she has to accept it. You see something drop in her, some sadness, some realization. I think that’s a great moment, very subtly done. I have to say that I think Nelly wanted this relationship. She went into it knowingly. She wasn’t forced.

And she’s not stupid.

No, she’s not. And she’s tough. I think if Claire were here she would say, “They are complicit in this secrecy.” It wasn’t just his patriarchal manipulation of her. Certainly there must have been days when her life was painful, that she couldn’t be public. You see that in their last scene together, when she asks him, “Will you come to see me?” That’s when you feel this sense of the love she has for Dickens but also this compromised life that she’s going into.

The Invisible Woman

The book is very interesting about what happens after that. Because he did often come to be with her—it was a serious relationship—but she also spent a great deal of time alone.

I think she would have been visited by her sisters. I wanted to have as much as I could in the film of the sense of family. The Ternan sisters and their mother were very close.

When you were preparing the film, did you look at other films set in the same period?

Yes. There were quite a few. I like Visconti’s films for this. But I looked at many others—Age of Innocence and other Dickens adaptations. Barry Lyndon, which is interesting because there is a coolness to Kubrick’s eye. I like that quite considered compositional approach. But the filmmaker who I love has nothing to do with this period. It’s Ozu. If you are dealing with scenes of familial relationships and intimacy, then I think it’s all in the performances—what’s happening between two people within rooms. And that’s what you have in Ozu. And in this film, most of the scenes happen inside rooms, and the conversation is kind of loaded. Often it’s not about what is stated, but what is going on underneath and the way people watch each other. You just need to find the right frame to capture that. A lot of period films are a celebration of the dresses and the period décor, but I wanted this to be about what’s going on inside, between people.

One’s awareness of the subtext is very strong. You know what she is thinking and not saying. But I asked about period film, because this film also gives you such a strong sense of the rituals and mores of that time. How that kind of repression takes its toll on people—you feel that very strongly.

Good. It’s a story of the human heart and what happens between people. Dickens and Nelly; Nelly and her mother; Dickens and his wife. And to a lesser degree, between the mother and her son and between sisters too. What I’m learning is where you put your camera on a human face to record what I hope will be a rich and full interior present moment. What that camera sees—that’s what the discussion with the DP should be about because I want the audience to ask what’s going on inside. The inner life is the thing to have present on the screen. That for me was the scene with Dickens and Nelly over the table.

You mean the money-counting scene?

Yes. He listens, she listens, he talks, she talks. I’m probably too close to it but I love it.

How did you manage to do that kind of extremely focused acting—where you are in the moment and letting whatever happens to you then and there happen—when you are also directing the movie?

I’d signed off on the shot. Basically in technical terms, there was a table, they had to be opposite each other, they weren’t going to move. There was the lighting to create the sense of night time intimacy—candles, fireplace, all that. I felt that the close-ups needn’t be complicated for the reasons I just described—I just wanted the camera to be in the optimum position. There’s this little monitor—they call it a clamshell, you can hold it in your hand, and I could look down and see the shot.

I wouldn’t like to be acting with you if you were looking down at a monitor all the time.

No, no, I’m not looking at it while we are doing the scene. I look at it before we start, to check the framing. So I say, Yes, that’s the shot, and then we start. But if I’m off camera, then Felicity had to know that I’m also watching her as a director. But that’s all right, because I think actors want to be directed. And there were two women, an acting advisor and a script supervisor, there to check my performance.

Did you rehearse a lot?

No, we had two weeks of rehearsal before we started, and that was useful.

And why did you shoot it in film?

I think there is a density to the colors in film, a thickness of texture that Rob Hardy [the cinematographer] and I felt was right, a kind of mystery and softness to what film does with colors and light. It might have been tinted with some nostalgia for film, but I think it was the right decision. There is that crystalline look that one can get with digital cameras, a high-definition quality, that wasn’t right for this. I wanted the painterly look of film, the softness, like brushstrokes.

Now I will ask you about Dickens. Your Dickens. He’s not such a sympathetic character, which is what I like about him.

It’s what I like about him too.

He’s a bit disconnected. I mean he’s connected to his work, but in his relationships to other people, he’s so busy presenting himself as he wants to be seen that he doesn’t notice much about how others are presenting themselves. He doesn’t really see them, and I thought that was really interesting.

I think he sees Nelly. I think he was impatient with his children and frustrated with his marriage. I also think a lot of the time, he’s motivated by order. He wants order. He orders life in his books. But in his life, he could have a jocularity or a vitality, or a gregariousness, but he was very fastidious and correct about how things should happen. I also think he sees the people on the streets of London as he walks through the city. I think when he talks to the young prostitute, he sees her for sure.

I agree that he sees Nelly, but in part that’s because she cares so much for his work and that’s irresistible for him.

Yes, but in that moment where they are at the window together—and this was hard and took a long time to get—and she says something about people sharing a secret, and he looks at her. Where a second before, he had been, as you say, Dickens being Dickens, I look at her and realize that I didn’t expect to get that from her. Suddenly someone has returned his observation to him with another spin on it. I suppose I felt that there was a man caught up in ordering his life and making sure that the rehearsals were okay and then he was taking care of the party with the children’s games and then he was making formal speeches to potential donors to the hospital—as you say, he was caught up in presenting Dickens. I think that when I was playing Dickens, I was thinking different things depending on the demands of each scene. So you get Dickens the host, bringing the Ternan family back to his house, and then he has that moment alone with Nelly and I felt that the Dickens I was playing was really happy to have a moment where there could be this gentle inquiry about each other. He hasn’t had that. I think it’s Dickens wanting to be loved really.

But he is much loved by the public.

But not on a personal level. To be loved for your heart, for the exceptional thing that is you, to be seen for what you are and to be loved for that, and not because you’re a famous this or a successful that—that’s another thing.

What I found really interesting in your performance is that this guy knows on some level that he’s not the person who people imagine he is. That’s what was remarkable—that he’d have these moments where he’d respond as he thought he should and then be puzzled about why his response didn’t feel quite satisfactory to him. And that’s where she can come into it. Because she seems to see him for what he really is.

That’s right. He’s built up a persona. Charles Dickens. You meet people like that. They come in with this persona they’ve built up and you want to say, “Who’s there, who’s really there?” I think I found my own version of that with Dickens. The energy of that organizational impulse. Some elements of my father came to me—“Come on then, do this, sit down there.” It was fun.

You might, without being disparaging, call In Bloom a perfect vin ordinaire of a film. It’s the sort of drama that you’ll always find at least one example of at any festival: an autobiographical coming-of-age story about two female friends, set against a particular cultural and geographic backdrop. In Bloom is in many ways a textbook example of the genre: it features classroom turbulence, family mealtime arguments, female camaraderie jeopardized as boyfriends assert their presence, and a smattering of radio pop in the background. The film could almost, cultural specificity notwithstanding, have been made anywhere: you can imagine similar In Blooms from Lebanon, Brazil, Iran, China. But it happens that this story is set in Georgia in the early Nineties, where Nana Ekvtimishvili grew up; she wrote In Bloom alone, but co-directed it with German filmmaker Simon Gross, who also collaborated with her on his own Fata Morgana (2007). And it also happens that In Bloom so triumphantly, albeit modestly, transcends its category that it’s really quite special.

The locale is the city of Tblisi in 1992, and the background is the conflict between the newly independent Georgia and the neighboring Black Sea state of Abkhazia, which started its own push for independence in that year. The specifics of the war only form, as it were, a background buzz in the lives of the film’s two teenage heroines, but we’re always aware of its presence in their everyday world: there are queues for bread, announcements of curfews, and a radio broadcast heard at the start, fiercely asserting national self-image: “There are always people in Georgia who are warriors by their very nature.” Heroines Eka and Natia prove to be warriors in their own way—just as well as they live in a world where violence is never far from the surface.

Introspective 14-year-old Eka (Lika Babluani) lives with her mother and older sister in a well-furnished, airy flat from which her father is absent. He’s in prison, for reasons that only emerge sketchily, and meanwhile Eka fondly contemplates a box of his possessions: letters, watch, cigarettes, passport from the recently disbanded USSR. As for her friend Natia (Mariam Bokeria), she lives in cramped conditions with her bickering parents, irascible grandmother, and kid brother, so it’s no wonder that her mind turns to love and escape. Natia has two suitors: local tough Kote (Zurab Gogaladze) and romantic beau Lado (Data Zakareishvili), who’s leaving to work in Moscow, but wants to marry her when he returns. There’s a nice twist in the boys’ courtship gifts: Kote the hard man gives Natia flowers, while it’s the tender dreamboat Lado who gives her a gun to protect herself with while he’s away. This gun is constantly produced throughout the story, looked to for comfort and courage, but the film neatly flouts the Chekhovian rule that a gun appearing on stage must eventually be fired.

The daily cross that Eka bears is the unwelcome attention of two dopey but still unpleasant juvenile bullies who loiter by a bridge (what more symbolic location in a coming-of-age film?): a scrawny twerp named Kopla, with whose family Eka’s parents may have unfinished business, and his lumbering sidekick. Eka isn’t great at standing up for herself, and best copes with this persistent duo when her more worldly friend is by her side: it’s Natia who, when Kopla throws some ridiculous action postures, spits, “Someone’s been watching Jackie Chan movies.” The payoff to this strand is genuinely unexpected, and leaves us with Kopla sloping off ruefully into torrential rain—a poignant moment in which you suddenly get an acute intimation of the kind of desolate future awaiting this unloved and deeply disadvantaged kid.

Set mostly, it appears, in spring, the film presents life in Tblisi as a sort of tarnished, precarious paradise for its heroines. The streets are sunny (until the heavy rains come), and there’s an atmosphere of airiness and birdsong, with echoes of that somehow Mediterranean-feeling leisurely atmosphere captured in Otar Iosseliani’s Georgian films of the Sixties. There’s a delicious moment in Eka’s daylight-filled flat, with the older girls smoking, gossiping, and enjoying a boisterous sing-song—before her mother arrives and the situation suddenly changes into a maidenly study group, with a decorous waltz on the piano.

But stress and unrest are never far. A queue at a baker’s van erupts into a case of bread rage. Later, at the same van, everyone just stands by and watches as Natia is abducted in plain sight by Kote and his cronies: when bread is scarce, people don’t care so much about what happens to each other. No sooner has Kote’s car sped off then the film cuts to his and Natia’s marriage, leaving us unclear how much choice she has had in the matter. At any rate, having escaped her own family, she’s now a prisoner in Kote’s—and we glimpse the merest oasis of a moment of freedom as she and Eka chat on an outside balcony. Then comes a magic moment of a sort we don’t often see in films set in the recent past: a proper old-school serenade, with a hired guitarist weaving a romantic spell for Natia. It’s a moment beautifully played by a smiling Bokeria: Natia leans against a lamppost, spellbound—you can practically see her heart beat faster in rapture.

This is one of several moments in which the film communicates intense emotion with absolute finesse: the girls go through a series of crises and jubilations alike, but almost never say outright what’s on their mind. The dialogue eschews neat declarations or pre-packaged moments of truth, yet we always sense acutely what Eka and Natia are feeling about their own lives, and each other’s.

In Bloom covers the familiar bases of films about adolescence: love, excitement, friendship, rebellion, danger, boredom and that curious feeling of constantly waiting for something to happen but not knowing whether you can precipitate it yourself. There’s such a feeling of timelessness and the archetypal that it comes as a shock when you hear some Georgian techno at a fairground, even more so when you get a burst of Phil Collins. The film this most reminded me of in terms of both mood and narrative is Taiwanese and set in the Sixties: Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day. But some street scenes, and the moments with Natia’s family smack of Italian neorealism, while the more exuberant moments are pure early Nouvelle Vague, very 400 Blows: a class outing to the bumper cars, the two girls’ dash through a field. Yet, for all these echoes, the film emerges from a world that most of us aren’t familiar with, certainly not from the cinema—and it comes as a surprise when the specifics of that world emerge, whether in the folk music ensemble at the wedding, or in a teacher’s brief but bitter imprecations against Georgian men’s commitment to the war.

The politics may remain in the background, and remain barely explained, but the film reminds us that in childhood and adolescence, the realities of the wider world tend to hover as a hazily apprehended backdrop while the immediacies of the private life impose themselves overwhelmingly. There are a couple of scenes especially in which the thrill of the quotidian comes across with fabulous vividness—a three-minute shot in which the camera pans to and fro around an uproarious classroom, ending in a breathtaking moment of mutiny; and another uninterrupted take as Eka comes into her own, doing a virtuoso solo dance at the wedding and holding the floor (and our gaze) with magnetic self-possession. The film is shot unfussily but rather lyrically in muted colors by Romanian DP Oleg Mutu, breaking somewhat with the out-and-out severity of his work with Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Sergei Loznitsa. Across the board, the film is terrifically cast, and there’s a lovely balance between poetic contemplativeness and a ferocious adolescent energy that keeps threatening to burst its bounds. Vin ordinaire, maybe, but a delicious and unfamiliar vintage.

Every other year since 1989, the sleepy northern Japanese town of Yamagata has hosted the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF). For a week, a who’s who of international documentary producers and directors, as well as enthusiastic locals and film students and film lovers from all over Japan, gather to immerse themselves in retrospectives, the best of the past year, and new productions from Japan and the rest of Asia. It’s like a meeting of a special tribe—there isn’t another film festival in the country that feels so intimate, with the possible exception of Tokyo Filmex.

At the 2013 edition (which ran October 10 to 17), Asako Fujioka and her programming staff put on an expansive Chris Marker retrospective, a sidebar looking at the Arab Spring, and a program curated by University of Michigan professor Markus Nornes on documentary ethics. At one revealing panel discussion, The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer danced around questions about the ethical challenges of filmmaking posed by Kazuo Hara, director of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. The films in competition were particularly engaging this year, attesting to the strong documentary work being produced throughout the world. Part of the excitement also lay in finding surprises among the festival’s other sections, as in the Japan portion of “New Asian Currents.”

The Targeted Village

One of the more popular films, and winner of the audience award and prize from the Directors Guild of Japan, was The Targeted Village. Director Chie Mikami falls firmly into the school of filmmaking pioneered by Shinsuke Ogawa, who documented the Narita protests of the Sixties and Seventies and was one of YIDFF’s founders. The influence of Ogawa’s activist direct cinema—the documentarian remains embedded for years if need be—is evident in many films screened at YIDFF over its history. But The Targeted Village is a document of a failure, following a few residents of an Okinawan village as they protest the construction of a new landing pad for American Osprey helicopters. Officials deny that the helicopters will be landing there, but sure enough, by the end of the film, the protests waning, Ospreys are glimpsed flying into the Okinawan sunset. As a piece of agitprop, Mikami’s film is capable of inspiring righteous ire, but cinematically treads old ground with its mix of protest footage, talking heads, and well-intended outrage. There will always be a place for documentaries that bear moral witness, but as an effective tool for agitation and organization, The Targeted Village misses.

More imaginatively conceived was Sakai Ko and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Storytellers, in which a handful of elderly folks tell mukashibanashi, literally “old stories.” These fables, filled with talking animals and farmers, aren’t necessarily moral tales, but rather fantasies that speak to specific historical conditions and contexts. The opening story features a farmer’s daughter who has become a monkey’s bride. She manages to kill the (actually rather nice) monkey and return home—a happy ending for a time when arranged marriages, of any kind, often worked out for the worst. Folktale collector Kazuko Ono conducts the interviews, coaxing old tales out of her octo- and nonagenarian storytellers. Most of the film is shot in close-up, head-on, lovingly highlighting wizened faces; the austere formalism keeps the attention on the stories themselves, often delivered in rambling monologues, the voices frail. The sometimes sweet, sometimes cruel yarns attest to cultural memory passed down by these old men and women, whose own memories are fading. Film as memory, Storytellers becomes one more step in the cycle of the stories we tell and how we perceive them.

Sound Hunting

The real gem of the festival, though, was Kenji Murakami’s 38-minute 8mm film Sound Hunting. Murakami’s been at the forefront of experimental Super 8 filmmaking in Tokyo with his very personal explorations of both the seamy and mundane sides of Japanese life. In his latest he shoots test rolls, using outdated film stock from 30 years ago that is possibly the last of its kind. Dirt, dust particles, flashes, evidence of sloppy developing by hand, and very occasionally, the dim images of what Murakami was filming—all appear on screen. In each sequence, Murakami announces repetitively, and somewhat obnoxiously, what he’s doing: “I’m shooting at night!” “I’m filming a woman!” “I’m filming the wind!” It all ends with a scene by the sea, and it’s like Brakhage meeting Truffaut as Murakami’s rich humor turns to pathos. His celebration of moviemaking becomes a wake for the death of physical film. At the Yamagata screening, some of the final frames of the film melted in the projector, adding to the sense of finality (Murakami said it was his only print).

The Shape of Night

Tokyo Filmex also has a bit of a family feel—that is, if your uncles are the likes of Tsai Ming-liang and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (the head of this year’s jury). Filmex is a tightly curated and intimate late-autumn festival where filmmakers and filmgoers mingle while waiting for the lights to dim in large Yurakucho Asahi Hall, its main venue. Must-see films that have been on the circuit for a while tend to take their final bows here; the competition runs Asian. Every year Filmex also partners with government organizations to highlight a neglected or obscure figure from Japan’s deep film history. This year’s focus was on the director Noboru Nakamura, a solid industry craftsman whose 1964 response to the Japanese New Wave, The Shape of Night, was a revelation. Gorgeous cinematography by Touichirou Narushima (Double Suicide, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) illuminates the story of a prostitute in a film that’s a lyrical, nearly Wong Kar Wai–like counterpart to ardent work by Oshima or Imamura from the same period.

Karaoke Girl

A highlight of the competition was Visra Vichit-Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl. Like Nakamura’s masterpiece The Shape of Night, the film chronicles the travails of a prostitute, this time in contemporary Bangkok. Vichit-Vadakan began the project as a documentary but changed gears, deciding instead to dramatize the life of her subject, Sa Sittijun. The twenty-something Sa plays herself with a deadpan world-weariness in a sadly familiar story of a small-town girl who goes to the city and finds employment only as a “karaoke girl.” Hints of the original documentary remain, and the film concludes with a brilliant scene that could have come out of Joshua Oppenheimer’s playbook. Vichit-Vadakan interrupts the drama to ask Sa what scene they could film that would represent her biggest dream. Cut to Sa as a karaoke queen, with her fellow workers doing their best June Taylor dancing. After we’ve witnessed the harsh reality of her life, the mundane nature of her dream, though it’s exuberantly realized, leaves us stunned and saddened.

Tokyo Bitch I Love You

Filmex saves a couple slots every year to showcase new Japanese releases, and it’s served as a launching pad for a host of indie directors. This year, they gave one of these slots to Kohki Yoshida. His 2010 drama, Family X, showed the mark of a promising talent. Tokyo Bitch I Love You, his latest, is a noble failure. Adapting Monzaemon Chikamatsu’s classic bunraku (puppet) tale The Love Suicides at Sonezaki to modern Tokyo, Yoshida follows the original plot closely—perhaps a little too closely. In the 18th-century story, a married man falls in love with a prostitute, and tragedy befalls him. But brought into the present, the character’s motivations and interactions feel archaic and unnatural, and the realism of the urban settings underlines the artificiality of the plot. A strain of subversive humor rears its head now and then. The man’s love object, played by Yuko Kageyama, is particularly jejune and unappealing. Koichi Itou, as the man in question, seems bound by the inevitability of the plot and withholds emotion. But it seems that’s exactly what Yoshida was after—a coolness and distance from all the ups and downs of a plot that Japanese audiences would find familiar. Yoshida has crafted a conceptually intriguing if not particularly likeable film.

The Horses of Fukushima

Finally, Yoju Matsubayashi’s post-disaster documentary The Horses of Fukushima features stunning footage but has a somewhat muddled trajectory. Matsubayashi went to Fukushima right after the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown to document a stable of horses that survived the flood but were doused with fallout. These emaciated former racehorses were slated to be sold to butchers, and because of radiation have been saved from the fate of being served in sushi bars. Their current limbo, however, may be worse. Matsubayashi spends a lot of time with them in their cramped corrals as they are prepped for the Soma-Nomaoi, an equestrian festival—touted as a symbol of the recovery of Tohoku, but for these traumatized horses, just one more trial to endure. The imagery is compelling—the claustrophobic stables, the horses’ ravaged bodies and seemingly knowing gazes, their evident delight in the few times where they’re allowed to run free—but Matsubayashi’s thesis is hard to fathom. Is he celebrating the horses’ survival? Is he being critical of the institutions that allowed the meltdown and the further quarantining of the horses? Is he questioning the function of Soma Nomaoi? Both yes and no, to all questions. What comes across most, however, is the filmmaker’s love of these ragged survivors.

Critical Mass

The logo for the latest edition of Migrating Forms features a thumb resting in a giant nostril. The ubiquitous “thumbs up,” associated with Roger Ebert and Facebook likes, turns into an uncouth intruder (you try shoving your thumb up your nose in public) and a signifier of unhinged digital representations of the body. The perplexing image comes from Even Pricks by Ed Atkins (who also made this year’s official trailer), and somehow it served as an apt emblem for the festival’s offerings at BAMcinématek, a departure from its previous base at Anthology Film Archives. Now in its fifth year, the successor to the New York Underground Film Festival continued its strong showcases of contemporary experimental work with an international scope alongside varied revivals (Sandra Bernhard, Johnnie To). Programmers Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry embrace an expansive understanding of cinematic work, which adds up to more than just an eclectic mix.

Migrating Forms deserves recognition for its dedication to bringing work culled from biennials and gallery exhibitions into a cinematic space. Surprise Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost’s Swallow, which deploys hypnotic exhortations (“This image is undressing you, you drink the image”) and resembles an ancient fresco of water nymphs come to life, was one of many such works. In the theater, Prouvost’s use of sounds of breathing (which Benjamin recognized as “the mode most proper to the process of contemplation”) were especially affective, and the work succeeds in leaving ample room for ruminations on its epicurean frolics. While Migrating Forms continues to serve as a reminder of the vibrance and potential of cinematic space in an age of medium and platform agnosticism, many screenings underlined the necessity for a sustained critical investigation that reverses the terms of the usual discussion by focusing on the exhibition of contemporary art in the cinema.

Sequence 01

The opening screening of the works of Ryan Trecartin heralded the festival’s array of human (and inhuman) figurations and relationships with the camera. Of the four videos Trecartin made for the 2013 Venice Biennale and presented here, three imagine the radical offspring of our media-suffused and brand-saturated moment. Trecartin’s shambolic works display a laudable drive to comprehend the contradictions of contemporary society: they’re as much pseudo-anthropological investigations as they are network overloads. In Trecartin’s mythology, these chattering posthuman reality stars comprise a brood that has returned to a recognizably human form after becoming “animated.” “Animation” is used as a catchall term for society’s increasing virtualization. (Repeated references to the evolution of dinosaurs into birds reinforce the loosely defined developmental narrative.) These are dispatches from a present-day future in which the mediation of everything from food to history has mushroomed with a dizzying dominance. In Center Jenny, one of the many Jennys describes sexism not as a phenomenon but as a good look. “Enough time has passed,” someone chimes in, satirizing our own faith in historical distance.  

Departing from the settings of the other three works, Trecartin’s Junior War looks instead at a recent past but provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of the artist’s genealogical impulses. In Trecartin’s hands, early-2000s footage of amped-up, mischievous high-schoolers becomes the rampage of a suburban war machine, depraved yet innocent. But if it’s release and destruction these kids are seeking, they’re always denied, and not only because they’re hassled by the cops. In one memorable sequence, a well-pummeled mailbox fails to bend to the force of restless youth. (It’s eventually deemed “fucking indestructible.”) The “warfare” begs the question: what hostilities are they rehearsing for? Revolution might be a generous analysis. While last year’s Migrating Forms felt like a response to political upheaval, Junior War suggests a sense of political frustration instead of emancipation.

The Salad Zone

The mailbox that wouldn’t break was echoed in Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah’s The Salad Zone, when two burqa-clad figures beat tools against a television’s glass face. A subtitle early in the video reads “There is so little room for abstractions”—yet through self-documentation Abdallah is able to find space to traffic in abstraction, as in one shot in which she makes herself so small as to fit into a large cooking pot. One of the strongest in the shorts programs, the film follows Abdallah and mixes diary footage with mysterious activities. From monotonous scenes of mundane action—chasing a cockroach through the living room with the camera—to discreet performances in public and domestic spaces, Abdallah’s film suggests that, even in a repressive society, transgressions are relative (tellingly, the TV eventually breaks).

The poignant work of Super-8 diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson, grounded in her manic and therapeutic relationship with the camera, received a mini retrospective. Two films from her “Five Year Diary” project—A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital (82) and Emily Died (94)—show her acerbic wit as well as a deep sadness and longing. In a voiceover layered with other sounds, we hear of her love for Doctor Who’s Tom Baker, her compulsive appetite, and her depression (Robertson was diagnosed as bipolar with post-traumatic stress disorder). Her fear of breakdown reaches a fever pitch in Emily Died, in which Robertson mourns the death of her young niece and returns to the liveliness of her garden for solace and reminiscences. These films (along with 1986’s Apologies, a work of frenetic penance) are a small part of the extensive collection left to the Harvard Film Archive after her death in 2012. Certain materials won’t be available for a decade, meaning that there’s yet more to come of Robertson’s work.

Merce Merce

Taking centerstage for one packed single screening was Without You I’m Nothing, the 1990 film of Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show. Bernhard gives a marvelous performance. Directed, like the stage show that preceded it, by John Boskovich, the act is set at an L.A. nightclub with an African-American audience that’s constantly rolling their eyes at her shtick. Amidst her long-winded comic routines, in which she skewers herself while maintaining an ineffable poise, Bernhard leaves room for musical numbers ranging from Burt Bacharach medleys to Nina Simone and Prince. Her dexterous impersonations and identities may feel a bit dated (at least for this young viewer) but her intrepid style is anything but. In one of many canny programming decisions, Without You I’m Nothing complemented the program “Merce Cunningham for Camera,” which featured two works from the collection of regular Migrating Forms collaborator Electronic Arts Intermix (previous EAI screenings include Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone and works by Cynthia Maughan). Cunningham’s collaborations with Nam June Paik and Charles Atlas showed the unique degree to which Cunningham worked with the camera as a choreographic interlocutor—a dynamic equally palpable in Bernhard’s film.

Gulf to Gulf

Fresh possibilities for documentation emerged in From Gulf to Gulf from the Indian collective CAMP. The artists gave cell-phone cameras to sailors working on boats crossing the Arabian Sea, and the result offers a salient and engaging look at the lives of globalization’s precarious workhorses. If Leviathan epitomizes the sensory potential of radically unfastened cameras, CAMP’s project looks more deeply into the politics of who picks up the camera. Similarly rooted in an intricate editing process, From Gulf to Gulf looks for meaning in this politicization and finds new cultural values in the oft-maligned camera-phone. From Gulf to Gulf is refreshing: humanizing without being mawkish and shot through with spontaneous expressions of joy from sing-alongs to dolphin-spotting.

If how we are ourselves—and perhaps how we are selves at all—changes in relation to our technologies of representation, Ed Atkins’s melancholy animations move into the realm of newer media. If Trecartin’s evolutionary mythology portrays humans after their “animated” stage, Atkins might be investigating the missing link. “Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine,” we hear in Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, setting the ghostly tone. Atkins’s HD protagonists are like walking carcasses—an excess of pixels with nothing underneath, leading to a crisis that the subjects of his works labor to express. His unsettling attention to the details—hair, eyes, mouths—that animation studios typically labor over in pursuit of naturalism lends the images an unsettling, morbid quality. Even Pricks, a newer work with a surfeit of clean phallic thumbs, takes an even more somber stance. “THIS SUMMER, DESTROY YOUR LIFE” reads the mock-action-movie-trailer titles that appear throughout. Ian Cheng’s bbrraattss, which recasts Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd as twitching three-dimensional figures burdened by inconvenient doubles, also dwells on the figurative possibilities provided by motion-capture technology. Cheng’s unstable creations are abandoned to their vigorous spasmodic activity, ultimately getting nowhere; likewise, Atkins’s dead-eyed heads remain suspended in their depressive state.

bbrraattss

Yet as João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva can attest, digital media is not the only home of the bizarre. Shooting on 16mm film, Gusmão and Paiva capture scenes that harken back to earliest cinema’s possibilities for new forms of vision: the tough rind of an elephant’s trunk as it squirms in the difficulty to sucking up a few peanuts, the revolutions of an egg (in a sequence reminiscent of Hollis Frampton’s Lemon), three albinos joking by a fire, a bright-faces cassowary wandering before a painted forest backdrop. Yet whether these sights merely amount to nostalgic consumption is a question the films fail to ask. By contrast, Laida Lertxundi’s Utskor: Either/Or—graceful 16mm chronicles of a Norwegian landscape far from her usual Californian locale with cues ranging from Bobby Bland to Frederick Engels—gently inquires about the relevance of analogue technologies while making the medium feel thoroughly contemporary.

Other works at Migrating Forms contended with the contemporary circulation of images. Jon Rafman’s Popova-Lizitsky Office Complex and Juan Gris Dream House—an offshoot of his ongoing Brand New Paint Job series of stills—move through architectural models decorated with modernist artworks. Rafman uses architectural allegories to remind us of modernism’s truces with industrial society. The videos become a sardonic sales pitch, accompanied by appropriate muzak and completed with frozen miniatures depicting ideal foot traffic. Rafman’s use of a corporate mode—the simulation of yet-to-be-built, saleable spaces—is formally interesting at a time when artists continue to concern themselves with questions surrounding late capitalism’s failures and excesses. The models are eerily still, but the moving images based upon them evoke the constant activity of culture, finance, and real estate.

Tomonari Nishikawa’s 45 7 Broadway and Gina Telaroli’s Amuse-gueule #1: Digital Destinies also feature media looking at other media, with an emphasis on transformative processes. Nishikawa’s multilayered film works with Times Square’s hallucinatory thicket of digital signage, while Telaroli transmutes a sequence from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies into explosions of light and sound. The routinely elaborate manipulation of images is the ostensible subject of Digital Destinies—a text accompanying the video details the reframing steps taken to produce it, from HD to Vimeo—but the piece delights in the potential for a sublime aesthetic experience while ironically undercutting it.

45 7 Broadway

Two more disparate works of compilation were James Richards’s Not Blacking Out, Just Turning the Lights Off and Shambhavi Kaul’s Mont Song. Not Blacking Out journeys through footage culled from the Web, while Mont Song assembles a variety of sinister and exotic studio sets. Both works choose suggestive atmospherics over rigorous scrutiny. Kaul draws our attention to cinematic spaces in which we are not meant to linger, while Richards revels in combinations of sound and image that veer from congruity to dissonance.

In a similar vein, Andrew Lampert’s intriguing archival thought experiment El Adios Largos posits a past in which Robert Altman’s languorous The Long Goodbye is a mythical lost work, a cinephilic dream. The fictional backstory: after finally surfacing in Mexico, the film was subject to a botched restoration. The result is the unfamiliar experience of a counterculture classic with pop-art colorizations and dubbed Spanish voices that feel detached from the bodies of Elliott Gould and even his cat. What if this had been the cultural object we’d inherited? With that experiment, El Adios Largos might be the most succinct explication of Migrating Forms at its best: it makes the cinema a space where we reimagine our history as much as our future.

One of the highlights of this year’s Migrating Forms, Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s debut feature deploys an allusive network of metaphors grounded in physics, geological time frames, and the borders between the physical and the virtual. Set largely at a particle accelerator program on the verge of shutting down for good, the film uncovers the similarities and discrepancies between the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the experiences of the flesh.

Carver and Schmidt’s provocatively esoteric hodgepodge of human endeavor—Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the burgeoning sexuality of adolescents, talk of drones and spirituality—is equally experimental and narrative in design. Michael Robinson’s Circle in the Sand comes to mind, as do the shorts of Portuguese filmmaker Sandro Aguilar, who works from his own idiosyncratic notions of what could broadly be termed sci-fi tonalities, and the uncanny narrative structures of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Unity of All Things resembles all of these in certain aspects, if only superficially, though it remains wonderfully difficult to categorize, making it avant-garde to a T.

Deep underground in an undisclosed somewhere, Xia Huang, the program’s aloof-verging-on-forbidding matriarch, is hosting a visit by her teenage sons (actresses Celia Au and Andrea Chen). The boys take considerable pride in their physical beauty but struggle to form an identity and conceive of themselves as independent from their role as brothers or from their mother’s much-noted brilliance. The young pair, whose flashes of cruelty toward one another are as scathing as their features are porcelain-smooth, have their doubles in the two remaining scientists at the depopulated facility: Huang’s right-hand “angel” (Haruka Hashimoto), and another woman (Jennifer Kim), pregnant by an anonymous sperm donor, who’s nearly as demanding for would-be mentor Huang’s embrace as the teenagers are.

There are two more pairs (or doublings): wanderers played by the directors themselves, introduced at the halfway mark exploring a cave (at which point the title card finally appears), and a couple of Mexican biologists hunting for a “non-indigenous exotic” (which might be a helpful way to think of this curious film). “It’s becoming difficult to track this jaguar with all these physicists, particle physicists roaming the desert,” one of the researchers remarks in hushed concern during the film’s ascension from the prenatal tunnels of the defunct accelerator to the deathly-white sunlight of the border.

As Huang prepares to secure funding for a new particle accelerator, her grasp on reality becomes increasingly slippery; her children remain awestruck if understandably confused. Carver and Schmidt’s film is essentially structured into three parts, each corresponding to a shift in geographical location and the characters’ emotional temperatures. The first is set during the accelerator’s end days in its facilities and surrounding forests; the second at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the terrain for a new accelerator program is being scouted; the third, basically an epilogue, in three separate places after the program’s team has disbanded. But there is a fluidity to the scenes that merges past and present, moving beyond a strict definition of when or where. (One recalls how Huang tells her kids that, eons ago, the universe was one “perfect liquid.”) As the boys talk about a Chinese soap opera featuring a time-traveling kung-fu master, a shot of fireworks reflected in a pair of black eyes is superimposed over a shot of a far-away valley (a memory from the boy’s youth); clouds rolling off a mountainside cross-fade to “become” the smoke from the fireworks.

Wry fluctuations in tone carry the narrative from one ellipsis to the next, and at times the humor undercuts the myopia of the narcissistic characters as they yearn for whatever shreds of certainty they can grasp (about anything whatsoever, their lives spent in the pursuit of Total Understanding). So the grim emotions at their and the film’s core become, if not humorous, what with all the increasingly unruly behavior (a flipped table at a party, one brother hitting the other in the face with a rock), then perhaps easy to relate to. These are defensive attempts at keeping that grimness at bay, like the grapefruit pink sunset that occurs during a funeral, with chuckling old women telling good-natured but dirty jokes and anecdotes about the deceased. Gradually, the characters’ impassivity (vacant stares and rigid body language) gets chipped away to reveal their throbbing insecurities: a son’s fear of being the least loved; or in the case of Huang, an exceptional intellect coming to terms with the limits of her abilities.

Light on plot, the film is heavy on character backgrounds and declarations (or confessions) of motivation. The detachment of the performances is disquieting, if slyly amusing for its deadpan humor; what’s more, the performers have all been dubbed in voices with almost robotic cadences, the hyper-articulate scientific jargon hyperenunciated. This clarity is itself doubled in the subtitling of the English-language dialogue, suggesting a split between body and action: what sound like the words of people confident, fully in control of themselves read, when paired with the on-screen action, like the babble of people hesitant, even fearful, at the very thought of rejection or uncertainty.

Particle science is the movie’s grand metaphor for longing and the precarious nature of personal connections. (The scientific project at hand involves constructing a miles-long particle accelerator, which requires finding a suitable space underground to house the gargantuan, delicately complex, and potentially unstable device.) Huang and her motley brood define themselves to a great degree in relation to one another, and they seek messily, earnestly, to clarify the nature of their relationships, and what these relationships might mean to the ongoing definition of each of their identities. This is less along the lines of sci-fi allegory than the sensual transcendence of Rimbaud: “from the soul for the soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colors.” The beautiful existence of something like a particle accelerator—a testament to man’s ingenuity and scientific derring-do that “looks like a chrysanthemum,” as one of the boys says—registers most significantly in the image of that boy’s fingers as he walks hand-in-hand with his brother, skimming along a part of the accelerator itself, “where the beams cross.”

That image of the boys helps portray the workings of the unimaginably powerful multibillion-dollar modern marvel as a kind of tender caress, bridging the infinite and the ephemeral. Touching and being touched becomes the film’s defining gesture: a slap seen in the background of a shot as a geologist, in the foreground, lectures on the folly of building an accelerator in mountains that, by their very existence, testify to an era before man; a boy’s hand on a pregnant belly, seen in silhouette through the windows of a high-rise from many stories below. 

Carver and Schmidt’s rich images have a vaporous quality, a mistiness hanging over the abundant grain of their Super-16 and Super-8 photography. The color palette morphs subtly from acid-wash to colors that are thicker, darker, then back again to something downier before progressing in slight variations and combinations of the downy and the dark. During an early night scene the patterns of grain buzz so visibly, and gorgeously, that it appears a layer of reality is beginning to peel off.

Taken in this light, the film’s effect is similar to viewing a lab sample (a drop of blood, say) under a microscope: when seen with the naked eye it has a uniform color and consistency, but when examined closer it becomes numerous different substances (cells, fibers, nutrients, waste products) with many discrete elements replete with countless different truths ready to be probed for meaning. (This observation could also be applied to the film’s fluid-but-segmented structure, another doubling or parallel.) The muddy, indistinct blacks are outlined in shadowy blue, sometimes set alongside a deep purple or purple-pink that, in its synthetic-bold hue, seems to announce the presence of an invisible fabric holding the various egos and their accompanying neuroses together in shifting harmony and discord. These blues and purples reach their apogee in an eerily calm nightscape of Huang stroking the head of her favorite underling, who lays unconscious from a snakebite in her lap, as that searched-for jaguar appears nearby, signaling a fade-to-black.

In the Jan/Feb issue, Jonathan Romney takes us through the career of Alain Guiraudie, and its curious mix of reality and fantasy (on view Jan. 24 - 30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective “Alain Guiraudie: King of Escape”). Guiraudie’s latest feature, Stranger by the Lake, plunges into the deep end with a story set (and gorgeously shot) at a lake by a cruising spot. In the film’s look at love and desire in the shadow of murder, a young regular named Franck falls for Michel, a hunk with a very dark side, and strikes up a friendship with a rumpled loner, Henri. FILM COMMENT spoke briefly with the director last September at the New York Film Festival.

It’s been a few years since your last film, The King of Escape [09]. How did you choose the story for your latest?

It’s not a bad idea to talk about this film in relation to the previous one. After my last film, I took some time off, about a year, working with a friend, just writing and developing the idea for a script. And the script really was the total antithesis of what this one is. It was a story about heterosexual love, it took place in the city, and in the winter. And after about eight months, I realized that it wasn't going anywhere. So I dropped that project, and I decided that I really wanted to focus on writing a story that would be simple yet would recount the story of very complex things. And I also wanted it to take place in the sun, in the summer, and in the country.

What I decided to do was to talk about something familiar to me. So the story was about homosexuality. Because in my previous films, the world that I had created was really rather fictitious. This time I wanted to base it on something I really knew, and I wanted to write a film that was about love, about desire, about really passionate love. I had shown family love and playful love before. But I really wanted to explore this idea of a passion where the other person really gets under your skin.

The movie gets under our skin, because you put us so close to Franck’s experience of desire and the fear he eventually feels. And I wanted to ask how you cast your actors, because the actor who plays Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is part of what makes it possible for us to get into this scenario.

None of the actors in the film are particularly well known in France. When I was writing the script, I had an idea of what the characters would be like. But when I write, I never have a particular actor in mind or a particular look. It's always a little bit vague. Once the writing is completed, then I go out and I try to find actors who would match my idea of who this character would be. So for a film like this, we saw 400-500 actors, in Paris and Marseilles. And we found our actors in Paris. They came by different routes, by direct screen tests or maybe a casting director saw someone and would send me a video test.

For the characters of Franck and Henri, the older man, the actors that we found very closely corresponded to the idea I had in my head. On the other hand, Michel was totally not like what I was thinking of.

What did you have in mind for Michel?

I had this very diffuse idea of what Michel was like, but the first thing I thought was that he would be someone older. I had originally thought Franck would be about 35, Michel would be 50 or 52, and Henri would be in his sixties. But I made everybody younger.

What a sellout!

[Laughs] I had never really considered a California surfer type that looked like Magnum P.I. or Mark Spitz for this character, at all. So, it was really only when I met Christophe [Paou] that I had this total re-conception of what the character would look like physically, what he would be like.

It's interesting to hear that Michel was different from your original conception, even vaguely. He's such a specific type.

It's interesting and a little surprising to me that I wasn't able to pinpoint what I wanted the character of Michel to be like before I met Christophe. And it's an aspect that is reciprocal. You have actors who really feed off the character—this is what they are. But in a certain way, sometimes they give the character a dimension that maybe the writer didn't originally have. I really like that interplay between what I originally conceive of as what the character is like, what his world is going to be, and then what the actor himself contributes to that part. I don't like it if the actor completely immerses himself in some idea preconceived by me.

The film’s lake setting is so rich, as a metaphor too. What drew you to that setting, and where did you shoot the movie?

It’s 150 kilometers northeast of Marseilles, in the direction of the Alps. It's Provence. The lake was a little more concrete than the actor—you have less choice between lakes than you do between actors. There’s a lake not far from where I live, and it's really rather small and round, and has very simple surroundings. I had this in mind. But when I was trying to find a location to shoot, which region of France, I wanted to pick the region that had the most sun so that we wouldn't have any problems with rain when we were shooting. But as far as the idea of the sexual metaphor, it's true that the lake itself has a sensuality—it's something that is very inviting, that makes you want to go in and take a plunge. The other thing that's interesting is that this area of Provence, in addition to being the sunniest, also has the most wind. I like having the wind as an element—it also contributes to the sensuality of the film.

The film’s look is so textured—the color and light are so vivid in a realistic way. You feel like you're there. How did you work that out with your cinematographer, what you wanted it to look like?

The Ditch and Uncle Boonmee were good examples in the sense that the lighting in those films was very sensual and works a lot with shadows and half-light. We worked only with natural light—there was no added light at any point. And what I found while we were working is that the light during the day is extremely nuanced. So, for example, you have the afternoon light, but then you have a different light at the end of the afternoon. You have the twilight light, and then you have a very different one at the very end of twilight. So we scheduled our shooting schedule really with the rhythm of the natural light. And we would have never achieved this look if we had worked the 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. working hours that are traditional in French cinema. Our rhythm was with the natural light.

This is the first time I worked in digital. I had thought originally maybe that I would shoot it in 35 mm. But we did some digital tests using the RED Epic. It’s shot in a true cinemascope way, with anamorphic lenses. I was very satisfied when I saw the results of the tests, because of the density and depth. It's something I hadn't seen before in my other work.

We worked very hard in creating the look of the film also with respect to the design, the set. We worked very carefully at choosing the forest area, what the parking lot would look like, what the hiking paths in the forest would look like. I worked with three artistic directors on this film, which I think really added a great deal of depth to the way the film worked. And also the costumes, even though there aren't very many costumes!

We also worked with a relatively small crew: we had 14 on our technical crew, and the three art directors. Because it was a very small group, we were able to work in that natural environment much more easily. I wanted to really specify that because I didn't want you to get the idea that because we had three art directors, maybe we were like a crew of 90. We weren't!

With that kind of attention to detail, we experience the place like we’re someone who goes there regularly.

Yes, yes. That's one of the attractions of filming on the same set every day. You get to see these nuanced changes, and you create this sense of familiarity.

Talking about the depiction desire in the film, another aspect is the imagery of the body. Could you talk about how you approached that?

I was very interested in showing a variety of bodies. I think that by doing so, you're showing reality. There are the really handsome ones and there are the ones that are a little plumper, a little rounder, maybe not as handsome, not as attractive. That was really an element that was present in a rough state in the script. But I think what wasn't quite so clear in the script—but which became clearer for me as I made the film—was how I wanted to show the sex scenes in the film, and to deal with the whole question of what is pornographic. Did I want to film it in a way that is what we normally consider to be a pornographic way of showing it, or did I want to take those kind of images, and take them out of what is pornographic, and move them in the direction of what's lyrical and poetic? That's of course the direction that I went with, but that wasn't obvious to me in the beginning.

As a filmmaker, you’re based outside of Paris, right?

I live 700 kilometers from Paris, and most of my films I choose to shoot outside of Paris. But almost all of the other work of the film is done in Paris. The production work, the post-production, the editing, the mixing. And even a lot of the pre-production work.

Do you feel like more of an independent filmmaker in France, is that something you would identify with?

I'm pretty far from the Parisian circles. The less I am in Paris, the better I feel [laughs]. I don't want to do any kind of anti-Paris propaganda. I have lots of friends there; culturally it's very rich. I think also it's very important, even though I feel like I'm independent, for me to go to Paris and to be in Paris at times. The film industry needs a major center like that where everything is concentrated—where people can meet each other, see new ideas, interact with each other. That's an important aspect of business. I also think that I'm one of those very rare filmmakers: I really did grow up in the country, and I grew up among the peasants in the country, I'm homosexual, I have experience as a Communist. In that sense, I am unique.

Where in France did you grow up?

I come from a department in France called Aveyron. It's about 150 kilometers north of Toulouse.

What attracted you to cinema?

I think I actually came to cinema rather late, when I was around 15 or 16 years old. But the desire to make movies goes back before that because I was very much influenced by television. I used to love to watch series: The Untouchables with Robert Stack, The Prisoner, The Invaders with David Vincent. What attracted me even more fundamentally than that is the whole idea of the image. I wanted to go out and capture the world around me, capture it in an image. And Tintin was also very important to me. In all of those kinds of comics, but Tintin in particular, there is something inherently very cinematographic about it.

Tintin is wonderful, the use of full-page panels.

Yes!

Like the one with the Incas, Prisoners of the Sun, when they burst in.

I think cinema to me also represents something far off. It was far off both in a geographic sense, because it happened in Paris. And also, in a sense it was socially far off, because it was something for rich folks. That's why I think a filmmaker like Eric Rohmer was very important for me, because he was somebody who made his films in a way that was very simple, very pure, and basically relatively low-budget. That made them much more approachable. And the idea of making a film like that was much more approachable.

And what brought you to this story?

I think one of the things that interests me is telling a story through literature. I write novels. And I work on these novels, and after writing a novel and working on it for six months, I throw it aside because I can't manage to finish it. But then I find things in the novels I wrote that are absolutely appropriate for a screenplay. So what is it about this, that it's easier for me to show it in the cinema than it is to actually finish it in the novel? My explanation is that there is a dialectic that's at work, and it's really the dialectic between what is real and what is fantasy. And I think that when you work with cinema, you're working with something that's real, that's concrete. But very often in the stories, you must move toward something if not totally fantasy, at least something a little less real, a little less an everyday experience.

On this whole question of desire, and capturing the idea of what is desire, what it feels like, what it is, the one who really did that was Marcel Proust. Maybe I'm really just a frustrated writer.

Well, there should be more frustrated writers like you.

[Laughs]

It may not surprise you to hear that Stuart Murdoch’s musical God Help the Girl is a little, well, precious. It’s a word that crops up endlessly in discussions of the writer-director’s other job as singer and main songwriter for Scottish group Belle and Sebastian (their very name, from a Sixties French TV series about a boy and a fluffy dog, tells you you’re not dealing with Mastodon). Murdoch delivers his elegant, witty lyrics for the band in a light, reedy voice, projecting an effete café-society persona that makes Morrissey look like a burly pub landlord (these days, of course, Morrissey does look like a burly pub landlord). Murdoch’s shtick, and the variously bouncy and wistful mix of folk, indie, and Sixties pop that accompanies it, demand either to be taken with a cynic’s pinch of salt or followed with reverent adoration—and legions of fans opt for the latter.

God Help the Girl, which premieres tomorrow at Sundance, is Murdoch’s debut as a filmmaker (and screenwriter). The Kickstarter-funded feature has had an interesting gradual development, yielding several musical releases including a self-titled album in 2009, credited to God Help the Girl—also the name of the band in the film.

God Help the Girl—the fictional band—is not Belle and Sebastian, but their sound is similar, as is the cover art of the real-life recordings, with their photos of pensive, art-studenty young women. And the film’s characters would certainly be Belle and Sebastian fans if they weren’t themselves in a group that seems, right down to its string section and ambitious arrangements, very much like B&S reincarnated as a vehicle for a female lead singer.

Murdoch’s film features new versions of songs from the GHTG repertoire, and its heroine is Eve (Emily Browning), resident in a mental health center where she’s undergoing therapy for anorexia. In the opening sequence, she sings, “I’m bored out of my mind, too sick to even care,” and she clambers out of a window and runs off to a gig at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. There are two bands playing—one a mundane guitar outfit with a narcissistically handsome Swiss singer, Anton (Pierre Boulanger). The other, more memorable for all the wrong reasons, is King James the Sixth of Scotland, led by delicate, bespectacled James (Olly Alexander), who’s punched out by his drummer when he’s barely begun his first song (“Yer a bloody tea drinker, you shouldn’t be in a band”). The drummer may have a point: even James admits, not without pride, “I’ve got the constitution of an abandoned rabbit.”

Improbably a lifeguard in a university swimming pool—where he looks like a lost five-year-old in his T-shirt and trunks—James instantly clicks with Eve as an artistic kindred spirit and platonic bosom buddy, and she moves in with him, abandoning her therapy. Both have songwriting aspirations, and when they give a music lesson to the ever so genteel Cassie (Hannah Murray), the three of them resolve to form a band. Being in a band, however, mainly involves mooning about in amusing hats, taking languid canoeing trips, and in James’s case, theorizing airily about the great pop tradition.

When the three actually get it together to perform, you’d be surprised how easy it is: they hand out photocopied ads for musicians, and a crowd of eager applicants pursues them through the streets—even, for some reason, a double of Julie Andrews as Maria in The Sound of Music. Next thing you know, a large, polished ensemble, string section and all, is playing one of their several literate, wispy ditties. In all the annals of movies about forming bands, I’ve never seen it done so easily. Maybe it just struck me that way by contrast: in the last film I saw on this theme, the Mexican feature We Are Mari Pepa, the struggling punk act still had produced only one number by the end, with the shouted English chorus “IwannacomeinyerfaceNATASHA!” (it’s quite alarmingly catchy, too).

As a Scottish film, God Help the Girl manifestly owes a lot to the carefree mood of Bill Forsyth’s fondly remembered (and, north of the border, dearly revered) 1981 teen romance Gregory’s Girl. (Murdoch’s film amires Emily Browning’s knees much as its predecessor did those of its heroine.) And, like the B&S style, the film’s “sensitive smart kid” aesthetic is rooted in the local indie-pop tradition of the early Eighties Postcard Records bands (Orange Juice, Aztec Camera et al), who adopted a stance of languid dandyism as a conscious reaction against the Scottish cult of working-class machismo—a radical position of sorts in the years following the boom of sexually normative punk.

God Help the Girl album image

But Murdoch’s film reenacts that reaction in an uncomfortable way: Eve and her pals live in an aesthetes’ private world a universe away from the hard Glaswegian boys who regard them with bemused contempt. As the trio drift by in their canoe, some lads ogle Cassie: “She’s a wee English rose. I bet she’s dirty” (in fact, there’s no evidence that she’s anything but decorously fragrant). “This is a ned town now,” James tut-tuts—“neds” being a disparaging term for young Scottish toughs, a word that Peter Mullan reclaimed in his underrated 2010 drama of the same name. Keeping a knowing distance from James’s dainty sniffiness, the film doesn’t necessarily subscribe wholeheartedly to his snobbery, but characterizing neds as a monstrous Other doesn’t look so funny in a Conservative-led Britain that has viciously ill-served the working class.

In many ways, this is the least Scottish of Scottish films—Cassie is English, James Scots-born but raised in England, and Eve an Australian who came to the U.K. following a boy in a band. It’s tempting to take the neds’-eye-view of Murdoch’s twee three—at any rate, the film defies you to either adore or revile them outright. Eve and her chums are variously neurotic, whimsical, and downright soppy, at moments almost creepily so: the loveliest melody here, set to baroque strings, belongs to “Pretty Eve in the Tub,” sung by James as he pines ineffectually outside the bathroom door (“Please allow me to scrub, please allow me to rub”). In this oddly childlike world, sex never quite figures: Eve sleeps with the hunky Anton, but we only see her in demure post-coital reverie, sheet wrapped chastely around her. Yet Murdoch is perfectly aware of the ludicrousness of his film’s infantilism, as signaled by Eve’s song “The Psychiatrist Is In”: “Grow up, you’re nearly 25 / What happened when you were a child?”

Murdoch hasn’t really figured out a strategy for shifting between his realist world—of Glaswegian landscapes, therapy centers, and actual emotional unrest—and the retro fantasy realm of British pop musicals. In terms of playing romance against realism, the film isn’t quite The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, let’s say. But GHTG isn’t after that level of sophistication—it yearns for an innocence that’s closer to Cliff Richard vehicles like Summer Holiday, albeit with a strong dose of French yé-yé urbanity. The film may suffer from a lack of dramatic concentration; several scenes just tail off when they’re beginning to show promise. But it’s most effective when it lets its hair down and gets into the musical routines. Some of these feel cheerfully slapdash, but that adds to the charm: “I’ll Have to Dance with Cassie,” played at a tea dance attended by pensioners and rockers, is a lot of fun, like a cheaper, more pure-minded Hairspray.

God Help the Girl album cover

Emily Browning’s character is perhaps not that much more substantial than her action waif in Sucker Punch; but the camera loves her, she makes a meal out of flirting primly with it, and she vindicates herself as a more than passable singer, much as Carey Mulligan did guesting on B&S’s Write About Love album. Hannah Murray is toothily jejune, and oddly reminiscent of Sally Thomsett from the much-loved 1970 British children’s film The Railway Children—which you imagine is Murdoch’s idea of the perfect gang to hang with. And although Olly Alexander’s foppish James is probably the film character I’ve most wanted to slap in a very long time, there’s no denying he plays him with gusto and consistency.

It’s easy to categorize Murdoch’s film as a vanity project, but if it is, it’s a very honest one. It will speak very directly to people who like Belle and Sebastian, and it’s an interesting case of what crowdsourcing can do for films when there’s a pre-existing fan base involved. It can result in features like this, which avoid commercial compromise and achieve some sort of quintessence of what admirers ideally expect from an artist. In many senses, this is exactly what you’d imagine a Stuart Murdoch film would be, and not in a bad way. DP Giles Nuttgens, who shot Scottish landscapes so persuasively in David Mackenzie’s Young Adam, makes Glasgow in summer look more lyrical than you might have expected; it’s exactly the town you always imagined Murdoch’s narrative numbers taking place in.

God Help the Girl is not a film for cynics—either of the musical or cinematic persuasion—but it’s done with good humor and integrity, and for all its flaws, I’d rather have it over a hundred conventional jukebox musicals of the Mamma Mia! school. If you’re even remotely willing to entertain a nostalgic fantasy of bohemian cafés inhabited by wan, bookish boys and girls in bobs and berets, then you may find it harder to resist then you’d expect.

In early 1967, the presciently titled documentary A Time for Burning appeared in theaters, months before race riots erupted in cities across the U.S. Originally aired on public television, the unassuming 58-minute piece of verité reportage follows a white Omaha pastor in his attempt to bridge the racial divide in his segregated community. But even his seemingly moderate initiative towards integration—a baby step, really—ends up wracking his church with discord: congregants defect, elders quarrel, and the high-minded pastor is humbled. On its own, the story may seem insignificant, but in light of what was on the horizon, this small-scale view on the intractable race situation offers a microcosm of the combustible conditions prevailing around the country, primed to spark into a national conflagration.

Bill Youngdahl, a clean-cut Lutheran minister with a flattop and a sense of social justice, is the film’s man on a mission, out to improve race relations. As a first step in challenging his congregation’s hidebound attitudes toward race, he works with black clergymen in Omaha to launch a series of house visits between couples at his all-white church and those at nearby African-American churches. He faces stiff resistance at every turn, both from offended congregants and the intransigent leaders of his church.

Lutheran Film Associates, the film arm of the Lutheran Church in America, commissioned director-editors Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey to document the church’s response to the ongoing Civil Rights movement, and gave the duo creative control over the project that would become A Time for Burning. Jersey, an early verité filmmaker who started out as an art director, keeps the camera hovering purposefully—zooming in on anxiety-creased faces and sticking with long conversations to catch the little slips and shifts in cadence that reveal what the speakers never say explicitly.

Sequences often play out as vignettes, ably revealing new shades of the racial picture rather than adhering to a tightly focused, linear story. Through tense church committee sessions, heated arguments between Lutheran leaders, racially fraught encounters, church services, speeches, and home visits, we get a sense of the personal and social forces that sustain segregation. Youngdahl’s interracial efforts initially unite the film’s action, but Connell and Jersey soon find other compelling characters and developments to follow along the way, such as the outspoken black advocate Ernie Chambers, and Ray Christensen, a mild-mannered white man whose conversion from an integration skeptic into Youngdahl’s fervent ally gives the filmmakers a perfect foil to expose the hypocrisy of other church leaders.

The decision to focus on a mainline church in Nebraska expands the geography of the mid-Sixties Civil Rights struggle beyond the usual, and dramatic, focus on the South, where events were often organized and staged with media impact in mind. What did the nice, decent middle-class white folk who made up the majority of the country at the time think about what was happening? Well, they weren’t all that enlightened, as the film presents them. Apart from a handful of progressive outliers, they abet or excuse various types of discrimination and segregation. After a group of young black teenagers from a nearby church attend one of Youngdahl’s services, some incensed congregants sever their ties to the church in protest. White teens on a similar exchange to an African-American church come off like spoiled brats, scared of black people and huddling with their own to avoid any genuine contact with other people. A white reverend shares the story of a woman who told him she has nothing against black people and wishes them the best; she just wants nothing to do with them.

The leaders of the Lutheran church’s council, a clique of white men in dark suits, are more politic when discussing race issues, embellishing their demurrals with sanctimony and obfuscation. Allow blacks to buy homes in white neighborhoods? But that would depress property values. Permit visits by African-Americans to the white church? That would make some members uncomfortable, and we can’t force change on congregants who aren’t ready for it. They’re trying to preserve harmony in the church, and fear that by “harping on the idea of civil rights,” as one church elder puts it, they will alienate congregation members. When he’s told by a church leader, “You’re trying to go too fast here, Bill,” even the ever-patient Youngdahl can’t help but grumble. “I don’t see how we could go any slower than this.”

Meanwhile, black clergymen gently convey their frustration at the slow pace of progress to Youngdahl, puzzled that a proposal for voluntary meetings between black and white people is proving so controversial to his church. A meeting of local black Christian youth presents students who are thoughtful, reflective, and articulate. They struggle to grasp the larger situation, understand their white peers, and find a way to move forward. Youngdahl shows considerable fortitude and resilience throughout the ordeal. He’s a heroic figure of sorts, a virtuous man driven by noble goals, going up against entrenched forces of reaction and putting his own neck (or at least his clerical collar) on the line. But he also plays a tragic figure, as he takes criticism from all sides: his parishioners, black clergymen, leaders of his church, and black activists.

Out on a visit to a predominantly black neighborhood, Youngdahl meets Ernie Chambers, a young barber. As he cuts a customer’s hair, Chambers calmly delivers an eviscerating rebuke of white society (“You’re treaty breakers, you’re liars, you’re thieves, you rape entire continents and races of people”). Youngdahl listens to the invective with his arms crossed, sweat streaming down his face. Presented as a random if remarkably articulate barber, Chambers—a law student who would go on to become a member of the Nebraska legislature—was known within the community as a whip-smart firebrand. Jersey has told of how he asked around to find somebody to engage Youngdahl and was led to Chambers, and then set up an encounter between the two. The effect is potent, though the means are a departure from the assumed norms of cinema verité.

A quietly haunting final sequence delivers a potent parting shot, as the film adapts the formal trappings of spiritual uplift—the faithful joined in prayer, singing joyous hymns to God, their faces filled with earthly rapture—to convey a bleak outcome. Its vision of enduring segregation may seem pessimistic, if partly prophetic.

Other contemporary profiles of racial friction in America tend to assume a retrospective cast. They appraise events after the fact and rely on re-enactments and voice-over narration to tell traditional stories that impart the lessons learned on the slow yet inevitable march to progress. In 1964’s Nine from Little Rock, Jefferson Thomas—one of the students who integrated Little Rock Central High School—narrates the story of the school’s desegregation and its aftermath from a solemn, at-times ponderous script by director Charles Guggenheim, punctuated by recurring shots of Thomas’s thoughtful stares into the distance. Just a few years later, A Time for Burning presents a less choreographed, if more meandering, portrait of the situation, free of script, score and narration. Perhaps more notably, here there are no pat answers, and no feel-good Kumbaya ending. This approach would find an echo in Edward Pincus and David Neuman’s Black Natchez, another 1967 verité civil-rights profile that foregrounds the fault lines within a seemingly monolithic group (black activists organizing voters in the deep South).

A Time for Burning prompted the broader religious world at the time to take some notice. A review in the Catholic weekly America praised it as “the finest and most honest attempt we have yet seen to portray the dilemma facing the nation’s churches on the subject of integration.” But even beyond that, the film—which has been used at Harvard Business School as a case study of social change—captures the enduring inflexibility of traditional institutions, and the sustained struggle and personal risk involved in transforming them.

Whiplash

Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash focuses on Andrew, a talented drummer at a prestigious music academy who aspires to be one of The Greats. Andrew (Miles Teller of The Spectacular Now) enters the orbit of Terence Fletcher, an exacting, verbally and physically abusive instructor (J.K. Simmons) who conducts the school’s elite studio band. A thrilling battle of wills begins as Terence torments Andrew in his pursuit of legendary status, to the point of leaving blood on the drum kit.

Simmons was clearly pushed to recapture the ferocious energy he showed in his days as Vern Schillinger on the HBO series Oz. His performance, part of the film’s wonderful immersion in the world of making music, builds from a steady, compelling drumbeat to a very satisfying crescendo. Beyond that, credit goes to Chazelle for neither soft-pedaling the damage that the instructor inflicts nor dressing up the murkiness of the “win” that teacher and student are fighting for.

Whiplash—which played like gangbusters with the audience—is the feature-length expansion of the short film by the same title that played here last year. Among this year’s shorts, the 17-minute Dawn marked the directorial debut of Rose McGowan. In this Fifties period piece, a sheltered teenage girl longs for an escape from her life. A hunky gas station attendant begins charming Dawn, giving hope that he might be her way out, but she soon discovers that getting what she wanted might have a finality she wasn’t counting on. The film is very polished on a production level, and there’s a sense that McGowan had a great deal of production support. However, it’s far more than a simple vanity project.

The Double

In The Double, Richard Ayoade’s second feature, Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a sad-sack office drone in a mundane data-collection job. The only excitement in his life comes from his co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in the apartment building across from his. He watches her every night through a telescope and tries to muster enough courage to speak to her. One night, he witnesses a man in her building jump to his death. The next day, a new, charismatic employee—who looks just like him and is named James Simon—begins working at his office. Simon’s double finds success immediately, eventually taking credit for his counterpart’s work and attracting Hannah’s attention. Simon himself quickly begins to lose his own identity to the point of all but disappearing.

Based on Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, the film’s strengths center on the nightmarish dystopia that Richard Ayoade has created through excellent production and sound design. It’s so oppressively intolerable that you hope that Eisenberg’s character won’t simply overcome his double, but everything else around him too. In this respect, it reminded me of Adam Rifkin’s 1991 film The Dark Backward. The Double is a fascinating piece of filmmaking, with the emphasis squarely on the “dark” and not the “comic.”

Wetlands

Finally, in David Wnendt’s Wetlands, Helen (Carla Juri) is a German teenager obsessed with her bodily fluids and hungry for sexual adventure. After cutting herself badly while trying to relieve the pressure of a hemorrhoid, she lands herself in the hospital. There she begins a playful flirtation with a nurse, whom she teases with tales of seducing boys with the scent of her unwashed vagina, masturbation experiments, and swapping used tampons with her friend. Through flashbacks, we gradually gain insight into her behavior and of her cruelly jealous mother and distant, distracted father.

Wetlands is unnerving and uncompromising in its display of blood and other things that come out of one’s body. It might be one of the most disgusting films you could hope (or hope not) to see. But it also manages to be captivating and engaging, largely thanks to Juri, who exudes sweetness and sincerity. The film is practically made to order for a steady stream of walk-outs, but I also believe that its fans will be devoted and enthusiastic. I know that I am.