The trailblazing Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) formed at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1982 before graduating and moving to a converted warehouse space in East London’s Hackney. Comprised of seven multimedia artists and thinkers from backgrounds in sociology, fine art, and psychology (John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, Claire Joseph and Trevor Mathison), they curated programs of avant-garde world cinema and created their own work using slide-tape texts, videos and films.

The group emerged amidst a peculiarly contradictory time for British society. On the one hand, the British Film Institute’s production board and the launch of independent terrestrial station Channel 4 provided fecund ground for artistic creativity, while the signing of the ACCT Workshop Declaration guaranteed funding and audience development for diverse filmmaking collectives like BAFC and the all-Asian group ReTake. On the other, Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing administration was busy developing its commitment to free-market ideology, and racially-motivated riots had been tearing through a number of the country’s urban areas, threatening a full-on culture war.

Handsworth Songs

Inspired by theoreticians like Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci as much as avant-garde filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Derek Jarman, BAFC seized on this climate of unease to create a questioning aesthetic which was left-leaning yet refused self-righteous didacticism. They would blend cascading montage and complex sonic experimentation with personal reflections on memory, immigration, and post-colonialism to forge a sub-genre of mostly nonfiction filmmaking that remains distinctive to this day. BAFC operated in various, often competing cultural spaces, including art galleries, television, and the film festival circuit, with the occasional theatrical release mixed in. At no point were they a mainstream concern. “The UK film world seemed largely unable to handle a manifestation of black cinema which didn’t cleave to the well-trodden path of anti-racist social realism,” wrote Gill Henderson, the former creative director of Liverpool’s Foundation for Creative Technology (FACT), in a foreword to the 2007 book The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective.

Handsworth Songs, which premiered on Channel 4 in 1986, was directed by Akomfrah (who would maintain this role in all BAFC output), and focused on the civil unrest that had occurred in the British Midlands district in 1981 and 1985. It is a ferocious work, and one of the first films to be clearly inspired by Stuart Hall’s efforts to analyze the ideological threads in representational approach of mass media materials, which he referred to as decoding. The film mixes archival film and newsreels (mostly of postwar immigrants going about their business) with found video of events surrounding the riots, and footage of the media’s reaction to them. It’s a bracing bricolage of sonic, thematic and visual dissonance that invites the viewer to consider how mainstream news reduces deep-rooted social unrest to simplified imagery and concepts. Handsworth Songs seemed especially prescient when Britain once more erupted into riots in the summer of 2011. As in 1985, the riots were triggered by police violence, and, again, the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless, motiveless criminal acts were repeated, almost verbatim, by a number of politicians including Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

Who Needs a Heart

Handsworth’s refusal to lecture the audience is a tenet that recurs in Who Needs a Heart (91), which dabbles in fiction narrative but may better be described as a refracted docudrama. It’s ostensibly about Michael X (aka Michael DeFreitas), the self-styled revolutionary and civil-rights activist of the Sixties, but he operates as the film’s structuring absence, visible only in sparingly used archival footage and photography. Instead the film offers a chronologically oblique study of a multiracial, London-based group of his acolytes in the Sixties and early Seventies, who serially drink, fight, and fuck in lieu of having coherently expressed political opinions.

Though beautifully shot in saturated colors and filled with stately, graceful camera moves, it is a bleak, slurred hangover of a film: overcast like the inclement British weather, and riven with ambiguity. It’s leery of the British Black Power movement, and makes some sour gibes at the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. Trevor Mathison’s sound design is to the fore, with music largely standing in for dialogue. His interweaving of jazz into the narrative is particularly effective, and seems to pose the question: why imagine words when the squawking, feral horns of Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, or Ornette Coleman evoke the pain, paranoia, and unresolved tension of the characters and the era well enough?

Seven Songs for Malcolm X

The BAFC’s next film, Seven Songs for Malcolm X (92) is a documentary-essay film that’s conventional only when matched against the rest of the group’s esoteric output. Framed around Malcolm X, which was released the year before, Seven Songs somewhat cheekily positions itself as a critique of Lee’s very mainstream representation of the famed orator, but not necessarily a hostile one—Lee appears as a talking head. In keeping with BAFC’s commitment to multivalency, Akomfrah gives us a variety of Malcolms: footage of his impassioned speeches, excerpts from his autobiography read by actor Giancarlo Esposito, contemporary reflections from friends, fans and associates, and, most daringly, an imagined version (lookalike Darrick Harris), who appears in a series of Jarman-esque, expressionistically lit tableaus. Unlike Lee’s film, it doesn’t attempt to cast the man as a heroic, definable figure; instead, it allows him to be many things to many people, and foregrounds his internationally minded approach. Akomfrah places particular importance on Malcolm’s trips to Africa between 1959 and 1965, which motivated his change in political philosophy from black national separatism to international co-operation.

The most recent work in BAM’s program, essay film The Stuart Hall Project (13), is a production by Smoking Dogs Films, the collective that sprang from the embers of the BAFC after it disbanded in 1998. It echoes Who Needs a Heart and Seven Songs as an unorthodox, quasi-biographical portrait of a fascinating 20th century black figure, but is elegiac and wistful in tone. It is characterized by the deep personal respect felt by Akomfrah toward the subject, who is a rare example of a black British public intellectual. “For many of my generation in the 1970s, [Hall] was one of the few people of color we saw on television who wasn’t crooning, dancing, or running. His very iconic presence . . . suggested all manner of ‘impossible possibilities,’” Akomfrah wrote in the press notes accompanying the film’s U.K. release. The editing is seductively elliptical, and the film draws on hundreds of hours of archival footage and audio, all of which features Hall.

The Stuart Hall Project

The Stuart Hall Project functions simultaneously as a study of Hall’s mixed experiences with notions of “Britishness” as a postwar immigrant from Jamaica, and an exploration of the development of his theoretical ideas in line with some of the major geopolitical events of the 20th-century. Already rich with melancholy thanks to the minor-key music of Miles Davis, the film has assumed an additional poignancy in light of the recent passing of its subject at the age of 82. When, discussing the cyclical nature of national politics, Hall states that “each new configuration contains masses of the old,” it’s as much an example of his searching intelligence as a comment on the ceaselessly thought-provoking films of Akomfrah and company: their oeuvre exhibits a rich continuum of thought, form and theme.

The consistency of Kevin Jerome Everson’s vast oeuvre—which spans short films, videos, and other media (sculpture, photography, installation)—resonates with the everyday, proletarian rituals he often uses as subject matter. His sixth feature-length film, The Island of St. Matthews, takes a fascinatingly oblique approach to exploring the tensions between nature, labor, and memory. As with his past works, its construction is deceptively simple, harboring conceptual and sensual intricacies that are equally manifest in the grain and light leaks of the 16mm stock (transferred to digital) and in the contemplative mood the film engenders.

Everson’s inspiration for The Island of St. Matthews comes out of his aunt’s terse response to his question about their lack of old family photographs: “We lost them in the flood.” The film unfolds entirely in his parents’ hometown of Westport, a small, rural community just outside of Columbus, Mississippi. Everson first juxtaposes languorous images that are seemingly connected only by their prominent use of rippling water as a compositional element: a man waterskiing (and wiping out); a man working at a lock and dam; and a baptism. This sequence is followed by interviews with locals who recall a pair of devastating floods in the area in 1973 and ’79. Among those providing testimony are a group of women congregated in a church parking lot, the church’s bell-ringer, a flood-insurance saleswoman making a pitch to new homeowners, and a one-armed former construction worker stricken with Parkinson’s. All of their stories—uniformly rich with anecdotal detail, including one woman’s remembrance of returning to her ravaged home, opening the front door, and getting blindsided by a fast-drifting television set—conclude with some variation on the painful concession: “That’s all that I can remember.”

Everson’s central subject here is collective memory, especially the kind that is forged by African-American communities in blue-collar or impoverished areas. But he is perhaps equally captivated by the repetitive movements of waves and of the dam’s mechanized doors, and by the spectacle of labor itself. From a beauty-school instructor lecturing on the proper way to apply conditioner, to the dam worker closely monitoring the condition of the barrier under his charge, Everson films work not just as “work” (that is, as a necessary pain in the ass) but as orderly, ritualized motion. In other words, Everson’s laborers—as with the black rodeo performers practicing calf-roping in the short Ten Five in the Grass (12), which will screen with The Island of St. Matthews during its theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives, and the clean-up crews dealing with the aftermath of the BP oil spill in Half On, Half Off (11) and Fifteen an Hour (11)—are more than mere cogs in a capitalist machine that ruthlessly exploits them (although there’s that, too). Rather, the workers’ lovingly filmed activity registers as both ravishing and profound, yielding a mostly spellbinding linkage between the ostensibly mundane and the metaphysical.

Everson leaves his sneakiest and most conceptually intriguing move for last. In the film's end credits, we're told that the production included contributions from both a costume designer and a water skiing coach. By calling attention to the essential artifice of some of what we've been shown (but which parts?), Everson effectively casts doubt on the capacity of cinema to represent in a nuanced way the most immersive movie of all: reality. Pace Picasso, Everson is after the lie that tells the truth—but just how much deception it'll take to access the truth remains an open question (not to mention a compelling reason to keep watching).

The Island of St. Matthews runs March 6 – 12 at Anthology Film Archives.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema runs March 6 - 16. Scheduling and ticket information are available here.

Over the next few years, keep an eye on Solène Rigot. Actually, I happened to think of her but I could have mentioned any number of promising young actors in French cinema—Maud Wyler, for example, or Laetitia Dosch, Kirill Emelyanov, Pierre Rochefort... There’s never any shortage of young acting talent emerging from France, not least because of the sheer volume of the country's film production (last year, 209 features were approved for funding by the CNC, the industry's government body).

Tonnerre

The way that engine keeps pumping ensures a constantly renewed workforce of young actors coming on the French scene—every season a new "new wave," if you want to call it that. In fact, it tends to be a case of consistently rolling waves rather than a sudden deluge. The latter happens, certainly—now and again, a single film will present us with a brand-new talent, exploding without warning onto the screen. The French press thrives on such abrupt "révélations"— as was the case last year with Adèle Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color), or in 2009 with Tahar Rahim (A Prophet). (In fact, these "meteors" rarely come entirely out of the blue: Rahim had already made a mark on TV, while Exarchopoulos had made several films and played Jane Birkin’s daughter at the age of 10.)

More commonly, though, French actors’ emergences tend to happen by slow accretion—you suddenly realize that you recognize someone because they’ve been there a lot in the background, or in small films that you’ve only half-noticed. Then, before you know it, they’re everywhere. It happened a couple of years before Blue Is the Warmest Color  with Léa Seydoux; in this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, she’s terrific in Rebecca Zlotowski’s power-plant drama Grand Central, playing a tough proletarian vamp, a sort of modern-day Simone Signoret role. Similarly in the Nineties, it took a while before you registered that Mathieu Amalric had acquired the superpower of ubiquity (the theory persists that French film financing works on a principle of "Amalric points": get enough Amalric into a film, even if it’s only the one-shot cameo he once played for Eugène Green, and your funding is secure).

A key related phenomenon in French actors’ careers is longevity, or at least the possibility of it. Because of its range, because of its emphasis on the personal, because of the emphasis on auteur work, French cinema tends to keep actors in business for much longer. There are more roles, and more appealing ones, for older actors, who seem much more able than their contemporaries elsewhere to sustain prominence for long periods, whether in lead roles, or playing parents or parental figures to younger actors. Veterans sometimes stage elegant late-career comebacks—although "comeback" seems too flashy a term for the naturalness with which some veteran actors seem to reintegrate themselves into the scene as prominent players. In recent years, this has happened with Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), one-time Franju heroine Edith Scob (Holy Motors), Niels Arestrup (A Prophet, Our Children), or indeed Dominique Sanda, magnificent as a chilly society matron in Nicole Garcia’s Going Away, featured in Rendez-Vous.

Going Away

What I’m suggesting is that, while critics tend to present French cinema history as one made by auteurs, it could be argued that we’re really dealing with an actors’ history. The individual trajectories of certain players—who, after all, rack up a lot more credits than directors ever do—help guide us through the ever-shifting map of the French film landscape. Directors may change the shape of that map, but it’s the actors, with their constant visible presence, that make the landscape more readable.

It’s also the actors that keep things interesting when the machine of French cinema seems simply to be purring along—maintaining a level of quality but not producing radical innovations. Arguably that’s the case with French cinema at the moment, and in truth, the formal or thematic shocks provided every few years by the boldest directors—the likes of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux—are few and far between. What tends to be true is that French filmmakers work flexibly within an established tradition, sometimes with the weight of that tradition very visibly on their shoulders; if, rather than a mood of perpetually fermenting radicalism, the result is a reliable "cinema of quality" (a term given the harshest negative resonances by the Nouvelle Vague director-critics), that’s not to be disparaged, because the quality continues to be consistently high and fascinatingly diverse.

So you can navigate the program of this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema as much through the faces as through the directors’ names. The opening film, Emmanuelle Bercot’s On My Way, is a prime example of how actors carry history with them. Catherine Deneuve stars as Bettie, a restaurant proprietor from Brittany who goes AWOL from her daily pressures and responsibilities and embarks on a picaresque series of adventures that include bedding a much younger man, hitting the road with her grandson, and attending a reunion of former beauty queens. The film is a low-key, entertaining comedy-drama about the possibilities of life for older single women, and without being aggressively mainstream, it has an unashamed crowd-pleasing element—what you might call the "You-go-girl!" factor.

On My Way

But the film is as much about Deneuve and her history as anything else. Deneuve’s status as French screen royalty is such that we can’t see her in a role without being primarily aware that we’re seeing the sainted Catherine (unlike Isabelle Huppert, who has the capacity of disappearing entirely into her characters without being obviously chameleonic). Bercot’s film plays knowingly on the Deneuve legend, on her longevity and the fact of her aging—a game that Deneuve embraces very happily. There’s a sobering scene in which Bettie wakes up with her gauche, bullish young lover, who awkwardly compliments her by telling her that she must have been very beautiful—in her day. And at the beauty queens’ reunion, a photographer instructs Bettie: “Head back for that double chin.” Not cruelly but poignantly, Bercot shows us a photo of Bettie as a young ingénue, a picture of Deneuve in her own starlet days. This is a film about accepting the aging process, even enjoying it—although to do that, it clearly helps to be Catherine Deneuve.

The important thing is that such films operate on the understanding that French audiences have a long memory. We may think of Maggie Smith, say, as having always been a magnificent part of film culture, without specifically remembering The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In French film, however, an actor’s past is nearly always implied in a film and that heritage is part of what makes each new role interesting. There’s also a strong sense of generations succeeding each other, each turning into the next. A notable case of a single generation or ‘school’ of young actors appearing simultaneously together was in the early work of Arnaud Desplechin, whose 1996 film My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument featured Amalric, Emmanuelle Devos, Jeanne Balibar, Chiara Mastroianni, Denis Podalydès—who all remain as presences in French cinema. Sophie Fillières’ If You Don’t, I Will shows how erstwhile young newcomers shift into the middle-aged bracket, and how watching them make that transition is part of the pleasure. Here, Amalric (more haggardly anxious than ever) and Devos become a couple in mid-life crisis. “What have we become?” asks Devos’s frustrated Pomme; “Your parents,” sniffs her husband.

Suzanne

As for new talent, this year’s Rendez-Vous is rich in names to watch, some of whom you’ll already know—without necessarily being aware that you know them. A case in point is the second film by director Katell Quillévéré, who made a striking, autobiographical, and somewhat conventional debut in 2010 with Love Like Poison, about an adolescent girl’s religious and familial traumas. The more adventurous Suzanne follows two sisters and their widowed father over several years; one, Suzanne, abandons her son to run off with a petty criminal, while the other tries to hold things together. The adventurousness of the film lies in its fragmentation, in the way that it lets Suzanne herself disappear from the action for long periods, so that the film’s titular subject becomes less a character than a sort of elusive phantasm.

The film is beautifully crafted and terrifically acted, the emotional core being the interplay between Sara Forestier and Adele Haenel as the sisters. Forestier was a genuine out-of-nowhere discovery in Abdelattif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance in 2003; having established a "wild child" persona in various films since then, she really comes of age inSuzanne, subtly playing on the character’s troubles and inability to settle (Forestier also more than holds her own in Jacques Doillon’s typically loopy mud-spattered psychodrama Love Battles). Meanwhile Haenel (who made her mark in Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies) plays the (ostensibly) sensible sister, but she’s just as punchy and prickly as Forestier. There’s strong support too by an established name (although less familiar outside France): Belgian actor François Damiens as the father, touchy and immensely touching despite some seriously unfortunate ‘rejuvenating’ make-up. Damiens also gives, incidentally, the show-stopping turn in Serge Bozon’s comedy thriller Tip Top: his hilariously deranged outburst of racist rhetoric at the start is one of those "force of nature" outbursts that are a French cinema specialty, in the Gabin/Depardieu tradition, and horribly entertaining.

This year’s Amalric Award for ubiquity, however, goes to an actor who has already been acclaimed as "the new Depardieu," although I suspect the term refers as much to his bulk as anything. Vincent Macaigne appears in three Rendez-Vous films, Guillaume Brac’s Tonnerre, Justine Triet’s Age of Panic, and Sébastien Betbéder’s 2 Autumns, 3 Winters. Bulky, beaky, hirsute, with long hair plastered into an unruly comb-over, Macaigne’s persona is as an awkward, likeable schlub with variations—he can make himself more tenderly shy, or outright clownish with a dash of blowhard. But he can also be abrasive, and his characters can turn when you don’t expect it. In Age of Panic—a film shot on the day of the 2012 French elections, using its quasi-documentary crowd footage to vivid of-the-moment effect—Macaigne plays the ex of heroine Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch) and father of her children. He’s seen at the start as a comically insistent sad sack, an amusing inconvenience who won’t be turned away; but once he bursts into Laetitia’s apartment and refuses to leave, Vincent becomes a genuinely troubling, indeed menacing figure, and Macaigne pulls off the transition brilliantly.

Age of Panic

He does something very similar in Tonnerre (the word means "thunder" but it also refers to the setting, the Burgundy town of the same name). Here Macaigne plays Maxime, an indie rock musician who’s moved back in with his father (Bernard Menez), and who starts a relationship with a much younger local girl, Mélodie (Solène Rigot, funny and affecting and, as I said, a face to watch). The film starts out as slackerish, tender, and comic—there’s some affable interplay between father and son and the dad’s very expressive dog, and a great goofy impromptu dance that Maxime does to charm Mélodie. And then it turns quite nasty, as we realize that maybe this couple isn’t the perfect match—only Maxime doesn’t see it. A violent turn in his character creates a shift that arguably the drama can’t quite handle but that Macaigne pulls off superbly.

The film I most urge you to watch, though—and certainly the most artistically inventive in this programme—is 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, written and directed by Betbéder. Again, it’s a film that carries a weight of tradition—it looks back to Truffaut and Godard, as well as the literary genre of the confessional récit. But it has a freshness that makes you feel that Betbéder and his actors are making up the story as it unfolds on screen. It’s a story about romantic encounters and tribulations—about two friends, Arman (Macaigne) and Benjamin (Bastien Bouillon); Arman’s love for Amélie (Maud Wyler); both men’s spells in hospital for different reasons; and Benjamin’s weird, seemingly telepathic sister (Pauline Etienne). Divided into two parts and several chapters of varying lengths, the film is narrated in turn by its three main characters, sometimes direct to camera, and uses animation, rear projection, film clips (including Night of the Living Dead and Alain Tanner’s The Salamander) to create a multilayered but very immediate comic evocation of life’s complexities and the dreams of youth.

All this may suggest something very classical, which in some ways 2 Autumns is—but it’s a film that has a magnificent quiet energy, always seems to be thinking on its feet, and feels authentically literary in the way that French films often do when they acknowledge that cinema isn’t just made of cinema but of other art forms and modes of feeling too. The film also tells us—quite explicitly—that it’s perfectly possible to love the films of Eugène Green and of Judd Apatow. In its gently persuasive way, 2 Autumns reminds us, as its Nouvelle Vague models once did, that anything is possible.

Postscript: Given that Vincent Macaigne is new French cinema’s embodiment of le slackerisme or the flag-bearer for France’s equivalent of mumblecore (le bofcore, as I like to call it), I nearly remarked that it’s only a matter of time before he’s cast in a transatlantic romcom opposite Greta Gerwig. As it happens, I’ve just noticed they’re both in the new Mia Hansen-Løve film (as is Pauline Etienne of 2 Autumns). Watch this space…

Axelle Ropert is something of an outlier in the world of French cinema. Originally known as a fierce critic associated with La Lettre du Cinéma—the short-lived Paris film journal that forged its own path and specialized in resurrecting Seventies French auteurs—Ropert has developed into a writer and director of gentle but profound films that achieved commercial success. Her second feature, Miss and the Doctors, is the ingenious tale of two brothers (played by Cédric Kahn and Laurent Stocker) who share a medical practice in Paris’s rarely filmed Chinese neighborhood in the 13th arrondissement. Making house calls as a duo, the brothers find their close relationship tested when they both fall for a delightful neighbor in a red coat (Louise Bourgoin, one of France’s most bankable young leading ladies).

Ropert's film (French title: Tirez la langue, mademoiselle) patiently accumulates enigmatic detail and builds through brief scenes to become a deeply moving story of love and solitude in a neon-lit Paris, yielding subtle surprises ranging from adolescent patients diagnosing their doctors to declarations of love in hospital waiting rooms. With its vivid nocturnal photography and Ropert’s wry, slightly heightened dialogue, the movie provides the basic but essential pleasure of a Hollywood classic from the Golden Age, erasing time while you watch but keeping its grip long after you have returned to the light of day.

FILM COMMENT discussed with Ropert the personal inspirations behind Miss and the Doctors, which screens in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and her love of movie glamour and telling details.

What was the basis for the story of Miss and the Doctors?

Despite appearances, the basis of the story is very documentary. I come from a family of doctors, so I know their way of thinking. I really like the medical milieu, which is a great springboard for fiction. I also know Paris’s Chinatown, the film’s setting, because it’s where I live. You never see the neighborhood in French film, though it’s a great setting for a movie. So I was inspired by the conjunction of the world of medicine and a neighborhood I know like the back of my hand. On a more cinephile level, there is a category of film I like very much, but which I don’t quite know how to describe. The French critic Louis Skorecki refers to them as films that have a domestic charm, a neighborhood charm. The major reference for the genre is a minor movie for which I have a lot of affection: Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. It’s a little neighborhood film with a delightful love story between two adults, set in New York in two or three settings. It’s like a song you would find on a jukebox. That was another thing I wanted: to make a film that would be like a song you put on a jukebox and listen to every day while you’re having your coffee and that has a kind of deep charm. I was also inspired by the Tim Hardin song “How Can We Hang On To a Dream,” which plays over the film’s opening credits and has a laconic quality and contained pain that set the tone. I usually start off on a film with two or three songs in mind.

Do French doctors really operate as duos?

No, that’s too weird! Only in cinema do brothers work hand in hand.

Your films have changed a lot since your first film, the 45-minute Étoile violette (05), which felt quite intellectual and in some ways remote, while Miss and the Doctors evokes what can be most profound in Hollywood movies. How do you perceive this evolution?

Well, I haven’t made many films: three in nine years. But I think my films have gained in flexibility and humor. I love humor in films, but you don’t find much of it in French auteur cinema. French filmmakers don’t allow themselves much humor, lightness, irony, or fantasy. I developed my sense of humor by watching a lot of American movies and now little by little I’m daring to use my sense of humor in my films, which I didn’t express when I was young because I was very shy. The combination of humor and novelistic storytelling is an American formula, not at all a French one. The great novelistic French films by Truffaut or Téchiné are not at all funny.

The way you film your female lead, Louise Bourgoin, is also reminiscent of Hollywood, particularly the Technicolor films of the Fifties. She nearly bursts out of the frame in that red coat.

My director of photography, Céline Bozon, and I took a paradoxical approach to Louise Bourgoin. Personally, I think Louise is at the peak of her beauty in my film, she has never been as beautiful elsewhere, yet the way we worked was the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do when you want to show an actress’s beauty. Normally, you put her in magnificent clothes, beautiful makeup, fancy dresses, high heels, all that stuff. We did the opposite: we really studied Louise and realized that we needed to reduce her classiness to magnify her and come back to a simplicity she lacked in other films. The beauty of actresses was a formative aspect of my desire to make movies, in the most basic sense of Hollywood glamour, meaning you have an actress and you try to reveal her beauty. I would be very unhappy if I was sent an actress and told, don’t worry about her beauty, make her look ugly. Making an actress look beautiful is totally essential to me. So I’m always happy when people tell me Louise is dazzling in the movie.

Your casting is very mixed: Louise Bourgoin, a movie star who started in TV; Cédric Kahn, a movie director who acts occasionally; and Laurent Stocker, a theater actor with the Comédie Française. Did you want to have a mix or is that just how things fell into place?

No... People who don’t like my film often say it’s too classical, too calm, too sensible, a little old-fashioned. That makes me really angry because I constantly took risks on this film. One risk was to cast actors who were extremely heterogeneous, both in their acting styles and their looks. I did this on purpose because it’s a lot more fun and lively on set when you take chances on the casting. I wouldn’t have cast actors who came from the same category of cinema—that would have been too boring. I intentionally made it really dicey, even if it meant catastrophe—there are some rushes that I wouldn’t want anyone to see! But it was premeditated.

Did you have a distinct way of working with each actor?

No. I don’t really believe in the principles of directing actors. I do it in the moment, based on the person and what he or she is like that day. Nonetheless, each actor had his or her specific way of working. Stocker is from the school of theater and loving work more than anything, so he’s absolutely autonomous in his work and constantly enjoying it. Louise comes from television, so she has terrible complexes and needs to always be reassured. She requires a lot of psychological coaching. Cédric Kahn is of a school which I thought would be easy but is actually very difficult, that of actor-directors. He’s very intuitive, which can be good and bad, but he has a hard time remaining an actor when he’s on set. He’s very difficult to contain, and on top of that, he comes from a type of cinema totally different from mine, a cinema obsessed with reality, documentary, etc. It was tough with him, but it made for a set that was very alive, explosive, and a little tense. I like that.

How did you conceive the film’s structure?

The edit of the film is extremely close to the original script. I have great admiration for films that feel like they were written, shot, and edited according to a single plan. When you see an Eric Rohmer film, you don’t feel like they turned everything upside down in the edit. I don’t really like the contemporary school of switching everything around at every stage of the process. I’m more enthralled with a Rohmer film, which appears to have an initial coherence and rolls along on a single track, than with Kechiche and company, where you feel like each stage is a revolution. I’m very sensitive to precision in cinema. Sometimes all you need is a precise detail for the whole scene to exist. Truffaut was obsessed with details. I think he was right: you just need a specific color or word or jewel in a scene for it to suddenly be like a little nail you drive into a wall and something very clear is expressed. I try to write with small details, while avoiding fetishes. Wes Anderson’s films seem like an accumulation of details bordering on fetishism. I don’t like fetishism, but I like small details that grab your attention.

Your dialogue isn’t heavy-handed or literary, but it calls attention to itself. How do you approach it?

That’s complicated. In the strategic context of French cinema, I’m very annoyed by people who say that the New Wave killed dialogue, that French cinema is lacking screenwriters. When I hear that, I want to say, who cares about dialogue and scripts, what matters is the direction! But on the other hand, when I see so many horribly written French films, I swing in the other direction and tell myself that it’s marvelous to write dialogue and I wonder why people don’t pay more attention to it. So I like dialogue that is precise and especially that has its own form. I have no interest in everyday common language. Both in life and on screen I like people who have a special way of talking, which doesn’t mean things need to be folksy or spectacular. All you need is for someone to have a somewhat peculiar accent or vocabulary and right away it’s like a story is beginning. When I write, I’m not looking to be natural—natural doesn’t come naturally to me. I try to lightly stylize the dialogue, which is a balancing act, of course.

Given the importance you place on dialogue, it makes sense that the French title of your film, Tirez la langue, Mademoiselle [Stick Out Your Tongue, Miss], comes from an expression which the two doctors repeat to their patients.

That was a provisional title we came up with at the start, which I found a bit cheesy. But we never found anything better, and once we saw the finished product, I thought it fit well. I don’t like it so much, though, because it sounds like the title of a romantic comedy, and the film is not a romantic comedy.

But it does make us laugh and is romantic. So what is it?

In any case, the romantic comedy in the film is between the two brothers, not between a man and a woman. I find the film too sad to be a real romantic comedy. Laurent Stocker’s character is quite heartbreaking. The end of the film isn’t exhilarating enough for a romantic comedy.

The sadness in the film also comes from your depiction of urban loneliness. You show the network of neighborhood connections, particularly through these two doctors who are known and appreciated by all, but people remain isolated.

I didn’t set out to show solitude in the big city. That’s such a cliché. Movies about that often have a shot of a character wandering alone in the crowd looking like a sad sack. I wanted to show something rather paradoxical, which is the pleasure of solitude in a big city. I love Paris and have no problem being alone here. People are alone in the film, but there is a kind of joy, or nobility, in it. I hope it’s not the conventional big-city loneliness.

The first time I met you, you mentioned that you would have preferred to shoot Miss and the Doctors on film stock. Yet your digital photography is beautiful. How would it have been better on film?

I’m still really unhappy with digital. Particularly since I just saw an extraordinary movie, Jean-Charles Fitoussi’s Je ne suis pas morte, one of the masterpieces of French cinema in 2014, and it was shot on film. It looks killer, which really poured salt on my wounds. The only positive about shooting my movie on digital was that I was able to capture life on the streets in a documentary style. All the street scenes are filmed without extras, it’s real life in the neighborhood, and we were able to do that because we had a small camera we could hide. Now it’s hard for me to imagine what my movie would be like on film, but I think I would have gained in the quality of flesh tones, which I’m very attentive to. You get a quality in the texture of the skin on film that you can’t get on digital. Ironically, I think we would also have a more natural look. My film’s photography is quite stylized, with saturated colors, sometimes over-saturated, but my DP and I had to stylize the color timing to make the picture more beautiful. On film, we wouldn’t have had to stylize to embellish the image. It remains a strong regret for me.

I love celluloid as much as you do, but digital seems to fit your movie, largely because there are so many neon lights with flashy colors, which look good on digital.

We were lucky to have the right setting for digital, which is to say a real place with beautiful, bright colors and strong contrasts. We made the film with very little money, so we didn’t have a lot of lighting equipment. My DP had very little latitude to make the set look good. It was an ideal setting for digital, whereas shooting digital by daylight in a natural setting would be hideous.

You don’t realize the film is low-budget while watching it. Can you tell me where it falls economically in the current landscape of French production?

The budget is no secret: 1.2 million euros. That’s tiny. The average budget for an auteur film is 2 or 3 million euros. Noémie Lvovsky and Desplechin’s budgets are generally around 5 million euros. But I’m really proud that I made a film with very little money and that you can’t tell. Since we knew early on that we wouldn’t have much money, we thought a lot about how to do things economically: we worked on the sets, the lighting and the schedule. I even think that the film’s lack of means nourishes its dramatic qualities, makes them more bare and raw. I may regret that we didn’t shoot on film, but I have no regrets regarding our limited budget.

Your film has had an unusual career. It did not go to many major festivals and it received a mixed critical reception, yet it seems to have real staying power.

I myself have a strange status. I first became known as an alleged ayatollah of film criticism, like a super-harsh Cahiers du cinéma type. It’s true that when I didn’t like a film, I had no problem saying so. But the films I make don’t match my radical image as a critic. I’ve often been told: “You’re an ayatollah critic but you make very gentle and simple movies. We can’t situate you at all.” I think that does me harm. People don’t understand how such an uncompromising woman can make such gentle, classical films. The second thing that accounts for my unusual career is that fundamentally what I like is classic American cinema. I like fiction, characters, actors, and actresses. I like simple things. So some people might think I’m going against the flow of contemporary modernity. I make films without ellipses, without editing effects, without hysteria. On the contrary, I’m really looking for the narrative’s linearity and continuity, for something organic. I think these are the hardest things to pull off. Trying to find the secret of the kind of storytelling you can find in American cinema is not very trendy at the moment in auteur film. There is a misconception about me, which is that I make classical, old-fashioned cinema. It makes me sad because I don’t recognize myself in it at all. What’s strange about Miss and the Doctors is that it received good reviews from people who aren’t my “natural” film family, i.e., the right-wing press and mainstream magazines, while those I am closer to, like left-wing papers such as Libération didn’t like it at all. So it started off as an obscure movie, liked by people who aren’t naturally on my side, but little by little it is drawing other people’s affection.

But it was a box-office success.

Absolutely. That’s part of the paradox. The film did very well in the theaters and made money, which is really important to me. If I made movies that lost money, it would make me sick. But I have a weird status as a director that can’t quite be identified. 

Yet your direction is as uncompromising as your criticism was.

There’s no contradiction as far as I’m concerned. I’m not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And on top of that, Miss and the Doctors has a kind of hidden uncompromising quality: though I’m not making the film against a particular kind of cinema, I am intentionally not doing many things that I hate to see in a particular kind of cinema. I often say that I don’t make my films as an artist. I don’t feel like an artist, I feel like a moviegoer, which means that I am making the films that I feel are not available to me as a moviegoer. For instance, we don’t see many films with relatively gentle, novelistic storytelling. If there were many films like that, I might make a different film. If there were a lack of radical, experimental films, maybe that’s what I would do. I always think of my films as a viewer: what do I want to see on screen right now? I’m trying to fill gaps.

Who do you feel close to in cinema?

Many people have mentioned François Truffaut in relation to Miss and the Doctors. I love Truffaut, but I never thought about him for the film. Fundamentally, the two schools that are most important to me are the French New Wave and classic American cinema. I’m very receptive to the French New Wave ethos by which the economy of means is appropriate to the economy of fiction, meaning that the money spent is visible on screen. There is a great artistic honesty in the way money is managed in a Truffaut or Rohmer film. That may seem like a detail, but I think the alliance of art and money is extremely important to making a good film. When I’m watching a film and I can feel that money is being wasted on screen, it drives me crazy. I like the New Wave’s aesthetic honesty, which is why it didn’t bother me that my film was made on a small budget. Otherwise, I love American cinema for the beauty of its actresses and its dreamlike quality. As for contemporary French cinema, I feel close to Fitoussi, Vincent Dietschy, who made a great comedy called Didine two or three years ago and an extraordinary film called Julie est amoureuse in 1998. He’s like Renoir’s illegitimate son—I’ve never seen a film that so easily carries on his legacy. I also like Sophie Fillières, Frédéric Videau, and Laurent Achard. Brilliant filmmakers, but outsiders.

Are you writing your next film?

I’ve decided to make full use of my sense of humor. My next film will be a romantic comedy mixed with Douglas Sirk. It has a dramatic and tragic narrative, since the lead character is a blind woman like in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, but it’s also a contemporary romantic comedy. I’m trying to find a way to make something that is novelistic but treats contemporary vulgarity. It’s a hard mix to pull off. So far it’s been my hardest film to write.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s Grand Central pairs two of France’s leading young stars, Léa Seydoux and Tahar Rahim, as illicit lovers working in a nuclear power station. Fulfilling the promise of Belle épine (10), about a young woman coming to grips with her mother’s death, Zlotowski broadens her horizons to immerse the viewer in an infrequently depicted world and create a bold metaphor of love as an irresistible force as dangerous as radioactivity. With its larger-than-life characters and steamroller emotions, Grand Central harks back to the era of French poetic realism, when stars like Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan defied the odds of a film’s grim social setting to create icons of glamour and romance.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Zlotowski last week to discuss the balance of documentary and fiction in Grand Central, which screens in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and the diverse influences that nourish her filmmaking.

What came first in the conception of Grand Central, the desire to tell a passionate love story or to set a film in a nuclear power station?

We had been trying to write a love story before the nuclear power setting came up, but it only became clear that we had the subject for a film once we had both. I don’t think one or the other would have been sufficient on its own. When my co-screenwriter Gaëlle Macé told me about people who work in nuclear power stations, it had a big emotional impact. Then we created a dialogue between the love story and the nuclear setting through the idea of contamination and radioactivity.

How did she become interested in nuclear power?

A novel had just come out on the daily life of nuclear power workers. It was a magnificent novel, but not very narrative, closer to being purely documentary. Gaëlle showed me the novel and a couple of interviews with nuclear power workers and by the next day I knew we would be heading into that world.

How did you gain access to nuclear power stations?

It was difficult, of course. The subject’s peculiarity is that it is a secretive one. The fact that it is transgressive and forbidden is part of what drew me. Part of my director’s libido was that I was dealing with a closed door and that with cinema I could crack open that door. It’s also a very masculine world, so for me as a young woman it was an opportunity to go into a place that was doubly forbidden. The unusual thing is that normally you write the script and then you do a location scout. Here, we wrote while we scouted. I didn’t have any preconceptions about that world, since I didn’t have any idea of it at all. We started before the accident at Fukushima turned the spotlight on nuclear power. Before Fukushima, we worked like journalists, meeting people who work in nuclear power stations and visiting the stations to learn the protocols: how you dress, undress, what are the safety measures. I quickly met someone very important to the film, Claude Dubout, who had self-published a book about his daily life in a nuclear power station. He became our technical consultant. I wanted to do a lot of research so the film would be credible. Of course, I was interested in achieving that so I could get rid of it later and create fiction. I could never claim that the film is documentary, but it is very well researched. That part of our work took a year.

Then Fukushima happened. I was in Los Angeles at the time, so I was close to Japan. There was an atmosphere of terror. The people I was staying with even went back to New York! That made our writing jump ahead, not in terms of the narrative, but as far as the documentary background. Before Fukushima, there wasn’t much, we had read practically everything available. It also created a new curiosity about the subject among financiers.

What was your angle on the love story before finding the nuclear power station setting?

We were writing a love story that took place during a war. A big love story with cannons and everything, set against the backdrop of the Spassky-Fischer chess game during the war in Bosnia. It was a very bad script, I would never have shot it. But the basis for the project was a love story in hostile times. I was interested in the hostility of love, the idea of love as a danger or a threat, not as something tender which you’re supposed to welcome with open arms and which consumer society sells you as an objective. I wanted to show love in a nearly baroque, sickly manner, as a symptom of a serious illness that you don’t quite know how to get rid of once you’ve caught it. So there was always this idea of a hostile world. I wanted to create real heroes, to reconnect with a tradition of heroism, rather than depict anti-heroes or mediocre people you can easily identify with. I wanted real heroes you have to try a little harder to identify with. And I wanted them to be in contact with death and danger every day.

It sounds like no matter what you were going to do, you wanted to expand to a greater scale than that of your first feature, Belle épine, which is very intimate and far closer to what we expect from French auteur film.

When you put it that way, it makes sense, but I didn’t think of it like that. I don’t think of directing as a career. It’s really one film at a time, when I find a subject that resonates both in a familiar way and in a way that belongs to society and the now. Having said that, it’s natural to fight your first film with the second one, and I’ll probably fight Grand Central with my next film. I am fond of Belle épine because it’s the first thing I directed and it resembled me both in its flaws and its qualities, but one thing I really hated about it was its elitist aspect. It was truly a colossal box-office flop. You really have to be French to be able to make a second film after such a bomb. It was thanks to the critics and the world of cinephiles that I was able to make a second film. But I recognized that the people who liked Belle épine were always people with whom I could already be friends, people who have a sensibility for its ellipses, austerity, and non-linear aspects, which requires a certain cinephilia. Grand Central is totally different, I tried to open up its narrative.

But I never thought in economic terms, whether about the film’s scale or its budget. In fact, the budget is not that much higher than my first film’s, it’s still in a modest range. In France, we have what we call small-budget films and mid-range films. Grand Central isn’t even considered a mid-range film because it was made for less than 4 million euros. The most important thing was to touch more people—I thought Belle épine was only emotionally involving to people who were already emotionally involved.  

Grand Central does operate on a broader level, down to details like the fact that the male lead is called Gary, which makes me think of Gary Cooper, and the female lead is Karole, like Carole Lombard. You seem to be working with a different set of references than in Belle épine. 

I’m from a generation that is drawn to sampling, we go looking for inspiration in music videos, contemporary art, pop culture, subculture, television, music, as well as the great classics. If you cite a single reference, you have the impression of erasing an entire volatile path. Of course, when you mention my characters’ names, I recognize American cinema’s powerful influence on people of my generation in France and all over the world. American cinema’s hegemony, evocative capability, power to fascinate, glamour, and sexiness has led my generation to be highly attentive to American culture in all its forms, going all the way back to the 1930s. But my character is called Gary because Gary is a Russian name which means “it burns.” So it’s not Gary Cooper, but the combustion of the character’s emotions. I should add that I don’t find Belle épine and Grand Central so different stylistically. They are both inspired by B movies and vast American spaces, as well as a very French cinema of tropisms and bodies rather than narration, which was particularly evident in Belle épine. I think I’m developing a style, which includes not having to choose between things. I don’t feel like choosing between digital and 35mm or between a film that is inward-looking or has action film stakes. I don’t want to decide between the portrait of a woman and the portrait of a man.

In fact, you decided not to choose between digital and 35mm for Grand Central.

Absolutely. Before you shoot your movie, your producer asks: “Are we doing it on film or on digital?” Now it’s rarely a question anymore, he just tells you you’re doing it on digital because it’s cheaper. But I’m lucky enough to have a producer who is as attentive to the film’s art direction as I am and knows that its visual dimension is as essential as the casting. Belle épine was shot on 35mm and in CinemaScope, which was truly luxurious for such a modest film. For Grand Central, my DP and I realized that since all of post-production is digital, we didn’t have to choose between shooting on film and digital, they would be treated the same way in post. Digital is really beautiful in artificial light and if you want depth of field and a really sharp image. But if you’re shooting bodies, warm tones, exteriors, anything in natural light, film is sublime, there’s no comparison. So when we were inside the power station, in artificial light, we shot digital and whenever we had natural light, we shot film.

That followed my initial desire for the film to have really violent contrasts. Everything is in stark contrast: the two leads don’t look alike, the interior of the power station is oppressive while the outdoors is bucolic. My composer Rob and I worked from the same concept: inside the power station, the music is very metallic, while outside we use woodwinds and strings.

The film’s central metaphor is explicit but the characters’ emotional lives and histories are more implicit. Was that intentional?

I don’t know. Sometimes you’re acted upon by the film’s form. The film’s form was to capture many characters in a relatively brief moment of crisis. When you capture a lot of characters, you have limited possibilities for showing their trajectories, unless you make very explanatory, heavy-handed scenes, which I wanted to avoid. But it also has to do with the way the characters were written. If you want to be mean, you can call them stereotypes. If you want to be nice, you can call them archetypes. Those are the terms I was thinking in, even on a visual level.

For instance, the leads only have one costume from beginning to end, which fits with the idea of creating legendary characters. That may be inspired from the Western, where you see a stranger turn up in town and you don’t know anything about him. He has one costume and a single action. So the film’s form inspired a kind of character whose emotional trajectory would be told over a period in time without reference to their past or future. We don’t even really know what happens to them. But my co-screenwriter and I know everything about the characters: when they were born, who their parents and first loves were, how they all met. As the Dardenne Brothers say, you build your film with scaffolding and then you burn the scaffolding, leaving something very strange.

We get little sense of Tahar Rahim and Léa Seydoux’s characters, or of why they do what they do. We’re very far from so-called psychological cinema.

Yes, though I have nothing against psychology. There’s a terrible prejudice against psychology, as there once was against sociology. You have to fire on all cylinders when you make films. I think those two characters are so archetypal because I believe in Pasolini’s statement that there is a cinema of prose and a cinema of poetry and that in the cinema of poetry you have the right to put in place bodies that are irresistibly drawn to each other. But I think there is a limit to that approach and that I may be reaching it with this film. Some people are really moved by the couple, but others can’t understand the intensity of their love. It seems arbitrary to them. I’m really questioning this now that I have some distance from the film. I think I went as far as I could go with telling about characters’ inner lives from a very instinctive, emotional, and sentimental point of view, without having to provide information. Now it might be time for me to invent something new.

Do you use all this biographical information when directing the actors?

Yes. We do a lot of rehearsal ahead of time, and I think it helps the actors that I know their characters’ biography. It gives them a different perspective, a way of behaving, of talking and walking. And it really helps me with them because it allows me to give them answers. Actors always ask questions. All the time! Because the people who are most afraid on set are the actors, which stands to reason given that what we’re asking them to do is so huge and demands such commitment. The more answers we can provide them, the better prepared we’ll be. That’s how I work now, but maybe I’ll do things differently on another film. I admire directors who don’t rehearse at all. That creates a different feel.

You have a strong relationship with Léa Seydoux. Did you write the film with her in mind?

I didn’t write it for her. So far I’ve never written a character and immediately thought of an actor. I need freedom and abstraction. I also create composite images in my head that may consist of one actor’s prosody and another’s gait. But it would be a little hypocritical if I said I hadn’t thought of Léa pretty fast because ultimately I didn’t hold any auditions for her part. Same with Tahar Rahim. I like to go after a single person. The idea of doing auditions for the main part worries me. Your impact on the actor is more powerful when you’re only approaching a single person, especially when you’re a director like me, who isn’t famous and isn’t going to make them a lot of money. The only card I have to play is how much I want them. I wasn’t done with Léa after I made Belle épine. Then she acted with these major directors, so for Grand Central it was as if I was reunited with a family member who was enriched by her work with directors I would never meet.

But Tahar Rahim was really the foundation of the casting. It was once I thought of him that I realized that associating him with Léa Seydoux was like creating a legendary film couple. I was also influenced by their position in the French film industry at the time. I knew that I would be creating a couple that people in France wanted to see kissing each other. When we went to Cannes with the film and they both had bigger films there too, it confirmed my intuition that they were at a special moment in their lives and in the industry. I really saw them at the point when they switched from being promising young actors to movie stars.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott.

This weekend, Stephen Chow’s blockbuster comedy, Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, hits American screens. Last summer, Wong Kar Wai’s moody martial-arts movie, The Grandmaster, got a U.S. release. These two movies have something in common, and its name is Jeff Lau—Hong Kong’s inspirational, celebrational, Lau-sensational pop god. He’s the man who made Stephen Chow grow up, and the guy who made Wong Kar Wai cool.

Hong Kong is home to a fistful of directors who are their own genres: Wong Kar Wai, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, and John Woo. Add to that list Jeff Lau, a comedy craftsman whose fingerprints are all over the industry as a writer, producer, and director, an excavator of talent, and a man who chases his whiskey shots of cynicism with gulps from the wine cooler of sentimentality. With a style that blends broad slapstick, deft satire, subversive politics, over-the-top visuals, sharp wordplay, vulgar dialogue, forays into time travel and reincarnation, musical numbers, animated interludes, over-the-top characterizations, airborne action, a gleeful evisceration of Chinese classical literature, and some of the most intricate plotting ever put on film, Lau’s movies stand alone.

East Meets West 2011

Take East Meets West 2011. Karen Mok, playing a goth chick who believes love is stupid, rushes to the aid of her estranged dad, Kenny Bee, a one-time rock ’n’ roll superstar reduced to playing a zombie in a haunted house (played by the actual Kenny Bee, a one-time rock ’n’ roll superstar, now retired). His hot young wife (his daughter’s former schoolmate) is on the run from a super-rich Mainland businessman because she stole the money he gave her to arrange a reunion concert of The Wynners, Kenny Bee’s old band (both in the film and in real life). After escaping from loan sharks via flying and talking to crows, Karen and Kenny hit Guangzhou, and wind up (in no particular order) arranging the concert, falling in love, receiving aggressive haircuts, discovering that they are the reincarnated Seven Heavenly Dragons locked in a millennia-long war with the evil Yaksha, develop superpowers, find the five other Heavenly Dragons, engage in battle with Yaksha, and learn that love is eternal. The movie sends up Batman, Birdemic: Shock and Terror, the cult of celebrity, and organized religion; plays “Happy Together” by The Turtles more times than is strictly healthy; and engages in stop-on-a-dime shifts from hilarity to heartbreak that actually work.

If you want to know how Stephen Chow went from being a manic television host to a bankable movie star, and then, five years (and 35 movies) later, went from goofy cinematic clown to playing semi-tragic, three dimensional characters in lush, beautifully produced, well-written and highly ambitious movies about love, failure, and success, then you need to look at the influence of Jeff Lau. If you want to know how Wong Kar Wai went from making miniature pop masterpieces jacked up on rock music and shimmering with urban anomie, to making slow-moving, carefully composed, somewhat glacial studies of romantic loss that all seem to be, to some extent, remakes of his early Days of Being Wild, then you need to look at the influence of Jeff Lau. Invisible to most outsiders, Lau is a man who has influenced the tastes of millions without most people knowing his name. He is Hong Kong’s Harold Ramis.

Coolie Killer

In the early Eighties when he was barely 27 years old, Lau helped film producer Century buy up the Sun Sing Chinatown theater chain in North America, then worked with Century as they made a string of landmark Hong Kong New Wave movies like The Imp, Coolie Killer, Man on the Brink, and Nomad, each one an exercise in avant genre filmmaking and ferocious violence. It was Lau who supported television director Patrick Tam’s hiring as director of Nomad, and it was Lau who had egg on his face when the production went off the rails and another director was brought in to shoot a new ending. (These days, Tam is famous as the editor of Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild and Ashes of Time, as well as Johnnie To’s Election).

Lau met Wong Kar Wai as an extra on a Century film, and later convinced Alan Tang to hire the unknown kid as a scriptwriter. Together, Lau, Tang, and Wong formed In Gear productions which produced Lau’s directorial debut, Haunted Cop Shop (co-written by Wong), Haunted Cop Shop II, the Alan Tang/Chow Yun-fat heroic bloodshed movie Flaming Brothers (written by Wong Kar Wai), and Wong Kar Wai’s debut film, As Tears Go By. In 1989, Lau directed the grim, downbeat anti-comedy, Thunder Cops II, starring comedians Sandra Ng and Stephen Chow, both unknowns at the time. Realizing that Chow was gruesomely miscast, Lau brought him on board to make All for the Winner.

God of Gamblers

Chow Yun-fat had starred in God of Gamblers the previous year, and it made a boatload of money, but Chow refused to shoot a sequel. Into the gap stepped indie producer Ng See-yuen (who had discovered Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, and Jean-Claude Van Damme, for better or worse), who had a treatment for an unofficial sequel ready to go. Lau came on board with action director Corey Yuen, and he brought Stephen Chow with him. Together, with All for the Winner, they founded the genre of mo lei tau (nonsense) comedy. The movie follows a Mainland hick (Chow) with supernatural abilities who comes to Hong Kong where his con artist uncle (Ng Man-tat, who would go on to make around 25 movies with Chow) ropes him into using his superpowers to cheat at gambling. All for the Winner launched a million imitators, grossed more money than God of Gamblers, and turned Stephen Chow and Ng Man-tat into Hong Kong (and then China’s) top-grossing comedy kings.

At the banquet wrapping up production, Lau told Chow that he would never work with him again (who knows why?), reducing a drunk Chow to tears. Over the next four years, Chow consulted with Lau and asked for advice on scripts, but Lau stuck to his guns in terms of further collaboration. Finally, in 1994 Lau’s New Year’s movie (Treasure Hunt with Chow Yun-fat) beat Chow’s New Year movie (Love on Delivery, which Chow had asked him to direct) at the box office, and Chow called him. He told Lau that he was forming his own production company, and because he would no longer be working for any of Lau’s business rivals, there was no reason not to help him. Lau agreed, then asked Chow, “How many times are you going to keep making All for the Winner?” And he unveiled his masterpiece, A Chinese Odyssey.

All for the Winner

Which brings us back to Wong Kar-wai and Jeff Lau. Flashback to 1990. When Lau left In Gear to make his Stephen Chow hit, his partner at In Gear, Wong Kar Wai, shot Days of Being Wild, a moody meditation on time and loss that was wildly reviled. Featuring six major Hong Kong stars, everyone thought it was a can’t-lose proposition, until the movie came out and no one could understand it. So Wong and Lau formed another production company, Jet Tone (named by Lau’s wife). Their first plan was to go to China, round up every major Hong Kong actor, and shoot a two-part adaptation of a famous martial arts novel, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, with Wong directing part one and Lau directing part two. Things did not go as planned.

By this time, Lau had parlayed his success with All for the Winner into a string of hits—the anime-inspired Saviour of the Soul, the gambling hit Top Bet, and his own personal favorite, the bizarre quasi-musical homage to Cantonese movies of the Sixties, 92 Legendary La Rose Noire, a film that manages to be stranger than its convoluted title (see the trailer if you don’t believe me). Currently, Lau was producing Wong Kar Wai’s half of their movie, Ashes of Time, which was spiraling out of control. As he says, “We wanted to do great things. That’s why we were stupid.”

Ashes shot for years and ate up an unheard-of HK$40 million. Lau canceled his half of the film and shot Love and the City to put another HK$4 million into Ashes to keep the production alive. Finally, it became clear that Wong was never going to finish shooting his film, sending the investors into conniptions. At the last minute, Lau stepped in and, as he put it, “saved Wong’s ass” by fulfilling Wong’s contract and shooting a comedy version of Ashes of Time using the same actors and based on the same material. Released on Chinese New Year’s, Eagle Shooting Heroes is Ashes of Time in drag and on crack, and it spared Wong from a lawsuit.

Lau and Wong have traded ideas back and forth, with characters from one director’s film appearing in another. Lau’s Love in the City may have been pilloried because it looked like a Leon Lai pager commercial, but it also influenced and was influenced by Wong’s Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. And for those who felt that Wong’s Days of Being Wild is too confusing, the original story is preserved in the first half of Lau’s Days of Tomorrow. These days, the two men are friends but don’t work together. If you want to know the difference between young, pop-tastic Wong Kar Wai, and melancholy, moody Wong Kar Wai, subtract Jeff Lau. As Hong Kong critic Thomas Shin writes: “Wong’s strength comes from suppression, while Lau’s strength comes from a surfeit of emotion.”

Chinese Odyssey

Which brings us back to Stephen Chow and Chinese Odyssey. More than Eagle Shooting Heroes, this film was Lau’s response to Wong’s Ashes of Time, shooting on the same locations and with many of the same characters (as well as the same music). Divided into two 90-minute films by the distributor (Lau’s preferred version is a one-part, two-hour-and-15-minute cut), it’s a twisted version of the classic Journey to the West, that opens with the Goddess of Mercy sentencing Tripitaka’s disciples, Pigsy and the Monkey King, to be reincarnated as mortals for 500 years as punishment for the Monkey King’s plan to serve Tripitaka’s flesh, which confers immortality, at his wedding reception. Cut to: 500 years later. The Monkey King is now the cross-eyed leader of a gang of terrible bandits (played, of course, by Stephen Chow). He’s forgotten his previous incarnations, and winds up the victim of two martial arts sisters, 30th Madame and Pak Jing-jing, who are staking him out while waiting for Tripitaka to show up again for a reunion so they can eat him.

Chow falls in love with one of the sisters, who was jilted by him in his previous Monkey King incarnation, and while hopping back in time (using the titular Pandora’s Box) to keep her from killing herself in despair, he winds up sending himself back 500 years, where he confronts his Monkey King incarnation and tries to keep everything from getting screwed up in the first place. This description leaves out King Bull and his army of giant fleas, a sexy spider woman, zombification, appearances by Brigitte Lin’s schizophrenic character from Ashes of Time (named Lin Qingxia, Lin’s actual name in Mandarin Chinese), and multiple scenes of Chow getting his penis set on fire, beaten with logs, or stomped on by a group of men. Also, there is another monk who sometimes turns into a bunch of grapes that are sometimes inside people’s pants.

Journey to the West

Needless to say, Chinese Odyssey is also a tremendously moving, melancholy romance about the Monkey King’s struggle to be a good person. It was a New Year’s hit that sent Chow’s career in a new, more grown-up and dignified direction where he began to actually play characters rather than performing shtick, and resulted in hits like God of Cookery, King of Comedy, Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle (which Lau produced), and ultimately his own version of Journey to the West (in theaters this week!). Since then, Chinese Odyssey has become a cult hit which has been more embraced by Mainland audiences than Hong Kong audiences, and you can still hear people quoting lines from it today.

ESSENTIAL VIEWING

Chinese Odyssey 1 and 2

This is Lau’s masterpiece, and the first movie where people saw that Stephen Chow was capable of so much more than just going for the joke. It’s confusing, ridiculous, surreal, and scattershot, but it’s also something of a classic of Chinese cinema and one of the great cinematic fantasy films.

If you want to know why it works, try this scene between the revered Buddhist monk, Tripitaka, and Stephen Chow:

Chinese Odyssey 2002

This was a project that Wong Kar Wai initially conceived and (somewhat) jokingly asked Jeff Lau if he (Wong) could direct it under his (Lau’s) name. Lau’s response was “Say no more,” and he rewrote the script and directed it. Wong shot some scenes, Lau shot others, and the stars are longtime Wong Kar Wai stalwarts Tony Leung and Faye Wong. It’s a potent example of these two men’s ability to feed off each other.

One of Lau’s patented karaoke musical breaks featuring moonwalking and amorous swans:

East Meets West 2011

There’s not much more to say about this deliriously cracked romance that the trailer doesn’t make abundantly clear.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Ringo Lam is back! I've been hearing rumors about this for a while, and now it looks to be true. After a roughly 15-year absence, Ringo Lam is back to making feature films in Hong Kong.

... The Hong Kong International Film Festival has announced their lineup and this year’s special focus is on films from the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Hong Kong’s version of the Internal Affairs Department). The ICAC has always sponsored filmmaking to educate the public and they’ve worked with directors from Ann Hui (whose ICAC films were banned and sent hundreds of cops marching in the streets), to Herman Yau (Untold Story), and Dante Lam (Beast Stalker).

... Another flick in the HKIFF is Boundless, a juicy-sounding behind-the-scenes documentary about Johnnie To, probably one of the greatest directors working today. Here’s The Hollywood Reporter’s take on it.

... Good news for fans of the inimitable Save the Green Planet (trailer; reviewed by Chuck Stephens in our Mar/Apr 2005 issue): Korean director Jang Joon-Hwan has emerged from an 11-year exile to direct a new movie, Hwayi: Monster Boy. Its reviews are as mixed as those for Save the Green Planet were, but maybe that’s a good sign?

... The extremely popular Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival announced its winners recently. Twitch has the full roundup, but here they are... Grand Prix: The Pinkie. Special Jury Prize: Gun Woman. Hokkaido Governor's Prize: School Girls’ Gestation. Cinegar Award: The Pinkie. Sky Perfect Movie Channel Award: Old Men Never Die. Short Film Competition: Inertial Love & Cycloid. Artistic Contribution Award: Anal Juice [in full here]. Special Jury Prize: Anemia. Grand Prix: Junk Head.

... The totally ridiculous Donnie Yen movie with great action, Special ID, opens today in New York and is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Well Go on March 13.

... And finally, we'll leave the last word to Jeff Lau, interviewed here in Time Out Hong Kong!

Familial drama lands smack dab in the middle of a political storm in Justine Triet’s debut feature, Age of Panic, screening in Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. The French title, La Bataille de Solférino (“The Battle of Solferino”), is perhaps a more apt description of the dramedy, which unfolds entirely over the course of Election Day 2012 in France—the fateful day when the staunchly right-wing Nicolas Sarkozy was ousted by François Hollande, France’s first socialist president since Mitterrand.

It’s on that same day that we’re introduced to the quotidian struggles of Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch), a single workingwoman with two infants. Getting out the door every morning is a battle in and of itself, but on this particular day, the children’s unrelenting screams are compounded by a pestering boyfriend, a hapless first-time babysitter (Marc-Antoine Vaugeois), and an apparently dangerous ex-husband, Vincent (Vincent Macaigne), lurking outside the building. Leaving strict instructions with the babysitter not to allow her ex into the apartment, Laetitia sets off via moped for Rue de Solférino, where she’s covering the election for a TV news station. 

Shooting on location during a frenzied political rally, Triet fuses documentary and narrative techniques to great impact, punctuating the drama with moments of comedic levity. The tensions of the election rise in tandem with the happenings at the flat, coming to a head when the kids are introduced into the chaos of Solférino, closely trailed by Vincent. FILM COMMENT caught up with Triet over the phone from Paris to discuss the role of politics in making the film and its distinctive in-the-moment energy. 

Can you talk about the genesis of your project? Given that a large portion of the film was shot on location on Election Day, I would imagine conception and execution must come paired fairly close together.

On the contrary, it was quite a long process to prepare the film. I started one year before. We were planning to shoot 20 minutes on Election Day, but we had to shoot a lot of things so we had seven cameras. That part of the film was very, very prepared, because we had to be. It was also very complicated, because we didn’t have all the proper authorizations. So it was like organizing for a war.

You’ve described your filmmaking style as “an organized mess in staging.” This film feels both highly improvised and highly structured. Can you talk a bit about your writing process? How much was planned in advance and how much happened on the fly?

What was very prepared was the narrative—the scenes were all precisely written. But since I come from documentary, I need to go against that, and the way I do that is to place professional actors next to people who are not actors at all to break that pattern in the shoot. What wasn’t written, for instance, was that the children would start crying, and also the project was written with the belief that Sarkozy would win the election. So the documentary element is all these things that weren’t planned for. When we were shooting in the crowd, there was always the risk that we could be kicked out of the area, which at one point did happen. The story is very dramatic, but the drama is always contradicted by the supporting characters who are more comedic actors, so there’s a mixture of tone—the happy accidents which I put in place through the style of my directing alters what is written.

That’s one of the things that works so well in the film—the highly tense drama is lightened by comedy. I’m curious about your method of working with your actors, particularly the challenges of working with such young children.

It was quite complicated to work with such young babies. Initially, I wrote the script for a 5-year-old, but I did a long casting process and didn’t find anyone who acted well. Ultimately, I cast my own daughter and my best friend’s daughter, which actually made things a lot simpler—working with a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old who couldn’t speak. I told the adults simply to adapt to them—the children are there, you must work with them—and I found that the actors were much better when they were around the children. I’ve rarely seen such young children in cinema really exist, where they’re not just decorative, and that led to a powerful tension. Of course, when they’re in Rue de Solférino in the crowd, it was dangerous at certain moments and we had to put the children aside and protect them and re-shoot certain parts on another day.

I don’t want to use the word manipulation, but at some points in the film we had to be very specific with the children. For instance, there’s one scene where we had to bring one of the children’s real fathers on set—the scene where Vincent Macaigne comes into the apartment—because the kids had to look like they were being reunited with their father. What I found very interesting was the effect the children had on the adult actors—it led to a raw and real tension. It was an accident that it worked out that way, but such young kids really served the film and this tension served the film.

The characters feel very real—they’re all extremely flawed and none of them is especially likeable. By the end, it’s hard to tell which of them is more irresponsible or more unfit to be a parent. Is the battle over the kids meant to parallel the battle for presidency, perhaps commenting that neither candidate is fit to be president?

Indeed, that’s something I talked a lot about during the promotion of the film: this duel between the parents, and the duel between the political left and right. It’s not something I theorized during the writing, but the idea of the duel did exist, and it was important to show that people are impure. I didn’t want the women to be just poor little victims and the men be their abusers, for example.

I did have a political vision for the film, which is that this is more of a depoliticized generation—politics is actually taking place elsewhere, in the family. It was important to set the film within something that is important for France, but ultimately maybe it’s anecdotal. There was a bit of a gesture of defiance in setting the film in that crowd. It reminded me of when I was in a similar crowd for the election of Ségolène Royal. When I was in that crowd, I thought to myself that everybody has a story and each of those stories is more important than the story that’s being told in the crowd about a political figure.

The film must have changed a lot if you were expecting Sarkozy to win. Did you have to re-write the end midway through shooting or did it still fit?

The only that changed was that there was supposed to be a major scene of revolt, and now it’s just a tiny scene in the film. I think if Sarkozy had won, the central character would have been in a crowd full of people crying, which is where I found myself in 2007 when I was in the crowd for Ségolène Royal.

Hollande’s unexpected victory ending is perhaps even fitting for the drama in your film. His campaign was based around change—just as the central characters try to change, though they never really do. Do you think France seen any real change under Hollande’s leadership or have things remained stagnant?

No, nothing has changed. And I knew in writing the film that there would be cynicism a year after Hollande’s victory. Watching it now, you kind of laugh to yourself when you see these posters everywhere that say “change, now” because most people knew that there wouldn’t really be change. Most people, of course, were happy that Sarkozy was leaving power, but even on the night of Hollande’s victory there was a certain disillusion and ultimately this becomes a comedic aspect to the film. I don’t think that I could’ve made this film in 1981 when François Mitterand was elected, because politics were more important then. My film is really a film about today, when the separation of a couple is more important than the election of a president.

The idea was a film that shows more than one perspective, and really to shift the audience’s point of view so that the audience takes sides at one point for him, at one point for her. The editing was done with that in mind. But ultimately, nothing has changed for the characters either.

You’ve said that your work focuses on the place of the individual within a group. Was your first feature an opportunity to expand on this theme, or a chance to step out into a different direction?

I did expand on what I’ve done before. There are no accidents—you can’t help but continue from where you’ve been before. But there is something new I did in this film, and that was showing Paris in a way that I don’t see it shown very often. Not as a museum city, where everything is fossilized, but as a city where spectacular things do happen. It’s not necessarily a dead city.

You come from a documentary background. Were you influenced by other genres or filmmakers, French or otherwise?

There’s a ton. It’s a difficult question to answer. I watch a lot of TV series now, but in the past I was very influenced by cinema, by Cassavetes for example. Today I’m influenced a lot by U.S. comedies, like Girls, and I’ve just discovered Orange Is the New Black.

Any future projects we can look forward to?

I’m beginning a new project, but I’m not talking about it much at the moment. There will again be a female character, and there will be a back-and-forth between her personal life and her professional life, but it will be a totally different world.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott.

Starring Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain as investigating judges looking into the murder of a police informer in a predominantly Algerian-French suburb of Lille, Serge Bozon’s Tip Top may be the most enigmatic film in this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. Bozon’s third feature traffics in provocation (Belgian comedian François Damiens starts the film and a brawl with a flurry of racist epithets), political critique (spoiler: the “bad guy” usually sits beneath a portrait of Nicolas Sarkozy), and flat-out weird slapstick (Huppert repeatedly sticks her tongue out to catch the blood from a cut on her nose incurred during an S&M session with her violinist husband). This outré material is anchored by a rigorous sense of camera placement, a delectably jarring rhythm, and abrupt, playful dialogue courtesy of Bozon and his co-screenwriter Axelle Ropert (director of Miss and the Doctors, also in Rendez-Vous). As labyrinthine as The Big Sleep, and as wild as Jerry Lewis, Tip Top is undoubtedly a thing unto itself: a sly portrait of contemporary France disguised as a B movie.

Bozon, an occasional actor, critic, and leading tastemaker among the young set of hardcore Parisian cinephiles, told FILM COMMENT about the basic principles behind his complex film. 

If your previous feature hadn’t been called La France, you probably could have used that title for Tip Top, which paints a portrait of France today.

I agree. This is the first of my films to have a strong relationship to contemporary French society, and oddly that’s because there are a lot of Arab actors in the film. This is always complicated to say, because what I mean by “Arab” here is not someone who has a different passport than I do—they are as French as I am—but people who have an Arab background and darker skin. Anyhow, if we shot the same script and replaced all the parts played by Arabs with Franco-French actors, the film would lose that relationship to contemporary France. It would also lose its most unsettling, painful aspects.

Ironically, your film achieves this representation of France through a B-movie script more typical of American cinema.

Yes, but the B-movie element isn’t only in the script. You can apply the same principle to the sets, the costumes, the frame, and the editing. The film has limited locations, to which we return repeatedly, such as the hillock where the informer died, where the supervisor kills himself, and where Damiens’s character prowls at dawn. Despite the fact that the characters are very different because of their jobs or personalities, they keep returning to these places, not for practical reasons like having a bite to eat, but because they are obsessed with them. That makes for something disturbing. My film has a splintered quality, it’s not very linear. We needed something to counterbalance that nonlinear side so we didn’t wind up with something too fractured and coarse, even from an aesthetic perspective. The idea of limited locations can be linked to the fact that all the car scenes are shot head-on and that all the scenes in Huppert’s room are shot from the same angle with the same framing and lighting. We didn’t do this to follow Oulipo principles or to pay homage to B movies: B movies were shot fast for financial reasons, so angles were repeated, which gave the films an unsettling quality that stuck in your head. We needed principles like these to give the film linearity and an obsessive consistency.

Which also explains the role played by Arabs. Everybody in the film keeps coming back to the question of Algerians. The film is actually quite simple: for example, all the French people in the film are obsessed with Arabs, and all the Arabs are obsessed with the French. The women only sleep with Arabs. In the men’s case, it’s not libidinal, but François Damiens’s character is learning the language, while his boss is interested in the riots in Algiers. A lot of critics describe the film as madcap and over the top, but I find it more unsettling. I see Tip Top as a rather dark film.

But there’s a real comedic intent that goes quite far into slapstick at times.

Totally. Look, I don’t have many ideas at first. I participated in writing the script, but it was really Axelle Ropert who did it, so it’s not like I showed up saying, here’s what I want to do, this is what I want to say. Plus the film is based on a novel. So I don’t have a strong point of view I’m trying to express during the writing, I’m not trying to take a position. On set and in the editing room, I’m dealing with more practical concerns like what location we choose. It’s only once the film is finished and I see it along with everyone else that I start to have ideas, just like the ideas I have when I see other people’s films.

Of course, there are comedic aspects to the film, and I wanted them there. Take the beginning of the film: François Damiens goes into a bar and starts yelling out extreme racist insults. I find this comical, but at the same time, it’s typical. It’s not something I find madcap or crazy, it’s actually quite scary, it’s aggressive. It’s a peculiar type of comedy that resembles the effect of the film as a whole. It makes you a little ill at ease. It’s not gratuitous because if you make a film centered on Arabs, the first question that comes up is that of racism. That scene goes so far into it that it deals with it for all the scenes. You never even have to bring it up again because it’s been said to the power of 10. The film’s comedy is like that scene.

It’s also a kind of disenchanted comedy. You have a critique of French institutions, using comedy to show them as fossilized and trivial.

Yes. I was interested in questions of protocol because it connects to how you direct actors and to Isabelle Huppert’s acting style. Protocol also means institutions, and if you say “respect the protocol,” you know things aren’t very lively. Protocol is like burying the institution. But I didn’t really try to make a critique of institutions because I don’t know them so well. It’s more instinctive. Look, in France, the yokels will go see a Dany Boon film and the sophisticated set will go see Pascal Bonitzer—in the U.S., it would be Woody Allen. I wanted to make a movie in which the comedy wasn’t a way to tell the audience they’re watching a chic, cultured movie. I didn’t want to have any difference, I wanted the comedy to be as trivial as possible, with people eating rudely and making animal noises.

The worst thing about cinema today is ghettos. A film’s audience often recognizes itself in the film. I wanted to make a film whose audience was unidentified and that did not have that art-house/prestige or non-art-house/no-prestige distinction. Slapstick helps to equalize things. Frances Ha is the exact opposite of what I want to do. People see it and tell themselves, oh great, we’re post-students, we’re vaguely marginal, we don’t make a lot of money, but we’re fragile and touching and we all have artistic desires. The relationship to the audience is very demagogical. It’s an insider, nostalgic film, with a very negative relationship to cinephilia and the New Wave used as pleasant identifying signs that rub you the right way.

Another example: I like rock. But when you go to a festival anywhere in the world, after a certain time of night people are going to talk to you about drugs and rock and it will always be the same. There’s a kind of adolescent culture purring all over the world because it’s so proud of being marginal, of having dropped out. I’m like Rohmer, I think dropping out is sad. My positions are violently against this kind of elegant saudade of loserdom. 

So do you agree with Huppert’s character’s statement that the unemployed are parasites?

No, no, no! [Laughs] That’s different. I’m not talking about the social fact of being unemployed. I’m talking about films which take comfort in being underground and apart, in which the viewer, who is himself a post-student loser, is being flattered for being a loser. I’d rather film the people who work at Air France or someone working in a bank. But you have to be sharp: look at Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. At first glance, it’s similar to Frances Ha. You’ve got two losers, black-and-white film, the Sixties vibe, all those identifying signs, same audience. But strangely the film has something more aggressive and acerbic to it. Plus there’s the incest. So that film goes beyond its prettiness. We drifted away from my film, but it’s because you asked me about slapstick, and I wanted to make clear that the comedy in Tip Top was not at all related to chic identification.

What about the relationship of comedy and politics? The “bad guy” sits beneath a picture of Nicolas Sarkozy and an unknown woman. Are we supposed to make a literal connection between wrongdoing and Sarkozy or is it simply a comic conceit?

It is kind of funny, because we’re mixing Sarkozy with this unknown woman, but at the same time it’s not gratuitous because the most important scene for that character is the last one between him and Huppert, in which Huppert realizes that the heart of the investigation is love. All the women in the film deeply loved their husbands. And the “bad guy” loved his wife so much that he became corrupt for her. So he’s corrupt, but there’s also a deep romanticism at play. The book by Bill James was totally different. Like many books that attempt to be provocative and somewhat antisocial, it falls prey to that “no one is innocent” shortcut I hate. I wanted to keep the novel’s aggressive humor, but not the cynicism. On the contrary, in the film you realize that people really love each other. So in the end, you realize that the picture of the unknown woman is not just a gag but a revelation about the depth of love, which also relates to the informer’s son Aurélien. His part isn’t fundamental, but he’s crucial because as soon as he’s in the shot, we realize the film has a dimension that isn’t funny at all. There’s something very unsettling and tender, which people often don’t notice the first time around. The shots of the child are like the final one of the bad guy’s wife: they make you realize that there is a “pure at heart” side to the film, that the characters aren’t corrupt in the usual sense.

Earlier you said you don’t take a strong position going into making the movie. What made you want to make it?

In general, I think filmmakers have too many positions, starting with me. The only difference is that my positions are as a critic and are ideas that come to me after the fact. I made Tip Top because I felt like doing something different from my other films, in a contemporary setting. Axelle Ropert brought me the book because she thought I’d like the humor, female protagonists, and final scene. I didn’t necessarily like the book as a whole, but I could tell there were things that would be good for me. Then we had to remove the cynicism and transfer the action from a bourgeois English setting, which did not feature a single Algerian. I knew the film had to have a social uneasiness, which is nearly its cement and is completely absent from the novel. Once we had adapted the film, I searched for economy. It needed to be head-on, a little brusque. Instinctively, I felt this project needed a form that wasn’t ceremonious or suave, but raw. Not in a stupid sense—I didn’t want it to be ugly. But it needed to be more graphic than pictorial.

In Tip Top, the police beat people and watch them. In a more subtle manner, we’re also aware that the media is watching. The film begins with a shot from a TV journalist’s balcony, which is the same point of view as that of the cameras shooting the Algerian riots we see on the TV news in the film.  

Absolutely. That’s the balcony principle. The French critic Jean Douchet pointed it out to me. He liked that we avoided sinuous, gauzy tracking shots with lots of depth of field and filmed more head-on. Douchet observed that the film either consists of people against walls or on balconies, so the only depth of field in the film is when we’re on the balcony: we’re only on the balcony when there’s voyeurism, and the voyeurism is always connected to the media. From a balcony, you can watch a guy doing his dishes across the courtyard or people making a revolution in the street.

But one makes mistakes from the balcony: when the TV journalist sees Damiens’s character recover an envelope from his boss’s body, he assumes they’re having sex. Does that mistake call into question the images of the Arab Spring shot from the same perspective? If you’re clearly questioning the media, it’s hard to believe that you have no position.

Films always do better by being simple and straightforward and going straight to the heart of the matter. I insist: I have no position. It was Jean Douchet who pointed out what I just told you, I hadn’t even noticed. But what I can say is that despite my lack of interest in documentary film, for the first time in my life I used images that were really raw. They don’t come from TV, they’re images of the riots which people in Algiers shot from their balconies. These images on an obscure local TV channel make something very raw appear on screen suddenly. Those images of riots in Algiers have a power of authenticity. It’s a basic Bazinian concept: something bursts into the fiction and burns it a little. It’s different than the TV journalist making a mistake when he sees the cop trying to get the envelope from his dead boss, which looks like a fully dressed act of sodomy. I like that kind of gag because it’s related to a plain police procedural question—how do you retrieve an envelope from a body lying face down without leaving any traces—but is also vulgar and aggressive.

It’s an abrupt tonal shift, which comes from people like Paul Vecchiali and all those directors who fought the real and the entire idea of biographical, depressive cinema in the name of fiction and tonal shifts. It’s the old story at the heart of French film: when Jacques Rivette directed his major documentary about Renoir, Renoir, le patron, Eustache was his editor. When they finished editing, they asked themselves what Renoir had taught them. Eustache said that Renoir says you should only film what you know, i.e., your life. And Rivette answered that what he understood was that you should film what you don’t know at all, what you’ve never experienced and could potentially never experience. Since then, French cinema has always been split between those like Eustache and Garrel who filmed their own lives and those like Rivette and Vecchiali who wanted to hold onto the risk of fiction, as well as abrupt tonal shifts and comedy. I belong in the Vecchiali category. I’m deeply in favor of narrative, with secrets, reversals, and surprises, which is a minority position nowadays. Take Laurent Cantet’s The Class, Justine Triet’s Age of Panic, or Kechiche’s films: many more films are based on an immersion in the real, with a documentary background, which isn’t to say that they are all the same.

We started by talking about another potential title for the film. I’d like to close by asking your interpretation of its actual title.

I like short titles: L’Amitié, Mods, La France. Why? It’s similar to what I was saying about economy regarding sets, angles, and costumes. It’s more likely to stay in your head. Tip Top also has a comedic ring to it, in the sense of a duo: Tip and Top. The film centers on a female duo, which is quite rare. It’s a subtle duo, too. It’s not like Laurel and Hardy, the fat guy and the skinny guy. It’s that one wants to be the other. Sally [Kiberlain] wants to be Esther [Huppert]. The film’s hourglass, its rhythm, is her transformation. Sally gradually dresses, talks and behaves like Esther and once she manages to imitate her boss in her sex life, the film can come to a close. The mimetic trajectory is finished—there’s nothing left to be imitated. The end may seem abrupt, but it’s totally logical: there’s nothing left to be filmed; the transformation has happened. 

Translated by Nicholas Elliott.

At the moment of this writing Son of God is earning decent coin in multiplexes, despite being a rehash of footage from a History Channel miniseries, and the gathering clouds suggest a deluge of kitsch is on the horizon with the forthcoming arrival of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. Is the Biblical epic well and truly back?

Best to withhold judgment on that point, though forgive me if I am skeptical of the prospects of either of the abovementioned works achieving greatness. For those wishing to retreat to a more fecund period in the genre’s history, however, there is good news. Tomorrow, Paramount’s new 1080p Blu-Ray transfer of Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah will be out, and this week, New Yorkers can see a 35mm print of Richard Fleischer’s Barabbas writ large upon Anthology Film Archives’ screen.

Barabbas, a bona fide spectacle which includes a mine collapse, gladiatorial combats replete with lions and elephants, and Rome in flames, is playing as part of a mini-retro of Fleischer’s films at Anthology which I co-programmed with FILM COMMENT’s Nic Rapold. The nine-movie sampler endeavors to draw representative works from every phase of the director’s four-decade career, while steering around the films that have more recently screened in New York.

A bit of remedial Sunday school: Barabbas is a footnote character in the Gospels. Here is how the brigand and cutthroat is referred to in my King James Bible in Matthew 27: 15-22, in which governor Pontius Pilate is presiding over the sentencing of Christ:

“Now at that feast [Passover] the governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner, whom they would. And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas. Therefore when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, ‘Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?’ . . . The governor answered and said unto them, ‘Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you?’ They said ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate saith unto them, ‘What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?’ They all say unto him, ‘Let him be crucified.’”  

The lucky Barabbas would be the subject of fiction and drama before and after Pär Lagerkvist’s 1950 Barabbas, published when the Swedish writer was nearly 60, but Lagerkvist’s was the definitive work. The year after its publication, Lagerkvist received the Nobel Prize for Literature—a fact noted in the opening credits of Fleischer’s Barabbas, because producer Dino De Laurentiis was going to get his money’s worth out of the prestige he’d paid for.

I have not seen Alf Sjöberg’s 1953 adaptation of Barabbas for comparison, but Fleischer’s film begins with the scene described by Matthew. Pilate addresses the people of Jerusalem in the inimitable Massachusetts honk of Arthur Kennedy, while Barabbas, described as “a rebel, a robber, and an assassin” wakes up hungover in a dim dungeon underneath the credit “STARRING ANTHONY QUINN.”

Barabbas is freed, and Jesus takes up his cross and begins his march to death. From Pilate washing his hands, Fleischer cuts to Barabbas washing his own in a public fountain. He then returns to his usual haunt, what writers of another period would refer to as a “low tavern,” where he is received as “the old rascal back from the dead,” and feted as “King Barabbas,” crowned with a wicker basket in a parody of the crowning of Christ as the King of the Jews. Barabbas’s celebration is only interrupted when, in the middle of a bright afternoon, the sky goes suddenly dark. The rabble spill out of the tavern in time to witness a full eclipse occurring behind Golgotha, bathing the crucified figures on the hilltop with ethereal light. (Several shots here were captured during an actual solar eclipse, filmed at Nice.)

In 10 minutes of screentime, Barabbas has been compared to Pilate, Christ, and Lazarus—whom he will briefly meet, played by the British actor Michael Gwynn as a caulky demi-ghost. Quinn encounters miracles such as this with his usual register of gruff truculence. His Barrabas is a quarrelsome animal, drunkenly lurching through Jerusalem’s alleys when on the prowl, though beneath the peasant suspiciousness, his wary squint betrays a glimmer of vigorous intelligence. Barabbas knows enough to descry the mirror image of his own barbarity in Roman officialdom. “Whichever side of the law we’re on, we’re the same men,” he tells Pilate at a second hearing that ends in Barabbas’s enslavement and deportation, putting a too-fine point on the visual match made earlier.

Now the property of Rome, Barabbas will spend 20 years in the sulfur mines of Sicily, perform backbreaking fieldwork, train in a gladiatorial academy, fight in the arena, and finally escape to the catacombs of the early Christians—for as Barabbas grows old, the renown of the man who was crucified in his place spreads. Haunted by what possible meaning his own survival might have, Barabbas vacillates between the role of victim and victimizer, halfheartedly converting to the new faith at the urging of a fellow slave (Vittorio Gassman) only to backslide again. The visual correlative to Barrabas’s inner turmoil is an overarching metaphor of dark and light designed by Fleischer and his gifted DP Aldo Tonti, whose credits include several of Roberto Rossellini’s canonical early works, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Nick Ray’s The Savage Innocents, and John Huston’s jaundiced Reflections in a Golden Eye. Barabbas is, in large part, a subterranean film, filled with almost tenebrist compositions, but it is marked by occasional flashes of blinding light. Emerging from his first imprisonment, Barabbas is struck by the image of Christ, the sun creating a halo around the pale Nazarene’s hanging head—a scene closely echoed in Barabbas’s emergence from the sulfur mines. Elsewhere, in near hysteria, Barabbas will recount the strange phenomenon accompanying the crucifixion: “That wasn’t light. The dark. That wasn’t dark. That wasn’t dark, that was life…”

The crucifixion and eclipse are accompanied by an arrangement of the plainchant “Kyrie eleison” which recurs in variations throughout the film. This is the work of Mario Nascimbene, who wrote the score, conducted by Franco Ferrara. Nascimbene had previously written the music for Fleischer’s 1958 The Vikings and later, beginning with 1967’s Survival, would collaborate extensively with Rossellini. Rossellini sat in with Nascimbene while he scored live at his “Mixerama” console, a synthesizer of his own invention and precursor to the sampler, contributing extraterrestrial electronic sounds to Rossellini’s sui generis historical films: Socrates, Blaise Pascal, Augustine of Hippo, Cartesius, Year One (Anno uno), and, yes, perhaps the strangest Biblical epic of all, 1975’s The Messiah.

Nascimbene, who was very well-to-do, had a home studio equipped with the latest technology, and was on the forefront of magnetic tape-based developments in absolute music circa 1960. In order to distinguish the Barabbas score from those written by contemporaries on other Biblical epics, Nascimbene scored it using the Mixerama, which he described in a 1986 interview with Soundtrack Magazine:

“The ‘Mixerama’ is an instrument which contains 12 stereo cassette tapes, so you can get 24 different sounds. I have more than 1,000 cassettes like that. I have recorded all the possible sounds the musicians in an orchestra can make, from the piccolo to the contrabass, male and female voices, the strings (now sharp, then soft, then trilling or pizzicato…) on all the notes of the musical scale . . . When I had all the sounds separately, I recorded the high and low ranges of every single note, and then recorded them separately onto the stereo cassette tapes. So in the end I had truly infinite possibilities of a mixture of sound. Each note had its own sound, but three or four used together change that sound. It’s all pulsating, creative, ‘living’ sound. Unlike modern computer keyboards, the ‘Mixerama’ uses pure sound treated in a human way.”

Scoring the crucifixion in Barabbas, for example, Nascimbene combined “voices, a soprano and two strings during an extended five-minute segment at the moment of the eclipse itself; [and] the sound of a bass at half speed.” While Nascimbene’s compositions for Barabbas don’t approach the same level of abstraction as his work with Rossellini, the sound design is full of what were, at the time, radical elements. In the scene which shows the scourging of Christ, for example, a metallic slicing sound is accompanied by a chorus of rising and falling feminine wails which sound like they come from a roller coaster plunging downhill—although there are no women present. The gatefold sleeve for the soundtrack LP release brands it “The Most Innovational [sic] Movie Score Ever Recorded”—those so inclined can find the album on Spotify.

The Boston Strangler

In its score and in almost every other regard, Barabbas is a very different approach to the Biblical epic, endeavoring to tell the story of early Christianity through the Life of Un-Christ. You could be forgiven if you have never heard of it nevertheless, for both subject matter and filmmaker are fallen out of fashion. Though even most skeptics will accede to the resourcefulness of Fleischer’s early B noirs (Armored Car Robbery, Trapped, The Narrow Margin), his standing within the ranks of American cinema has long been a matter of some question. In part this is because the diversity of his output, including a precipitous decline in his final decade, has made him a problematic figure for auteur candidacy. If one clear worldview that can be extrapolated from his work, particularly in the great crime-and-punishment trilogy of Compulsion (59), The Boston Strangler (68), and 10 Rillington Place (71), it is a staunch opposition to the death penalty. One can even locate this in Barabbas, which does after all begin with the execution of an innocent man. And Barabbas lines up quite well with Fleischer’s later work with Dino De Laurentiis Productions, Mandingo (75) and Conan the Destroyer (84), both movies which may be said to deal with the struggle for self-determination.

Fleischer returned to narratives of manumission and emancipation, and had a disorderly career to match. Despite this, he never successfully styled himself as a system-bucking “maverick” like, say, Robert Altman, who co-wrote the story that was the basis for Fleischer’s 1948 Bodyguard, released when Altman had just begun his struggle to break into the pictures business. While Altman wouldn’t direct his first Hollywood fiction feature for 20 years, Fleischer was steadily working for most of that time, his output including 1967’s Doctor Doolittle, a film that came to symbolize the Old Hollywood excess that Altman & Co. were soon to wash away. Or witness the strange fate of The Last Run (71), whose direction Fleischer took over after John Huston walked off the set over a row with star George C. Scott. It’s a major film, with a pained, poignant performance by Scott, a great Alan Sharp script (“I don't blow boxes, man, I blow heads. When I say bang, everything gets suddenly dark”), and umbrous photography by Sven Nykvist, and it shows Fleischer every bit as alive to the new, permissive possibilities of the period as Huston would prove to be with Fat City in 1973. (By that point Fleischer had already been on a great post-Doolittle run with The Boston Strangler, Rillington, See No Evil, and The New Centurions, the latter two also playing Anthology.) Huston, son of actor Walter, was born into showbiz every bit as much as Fleischer, the son of animator Max—but while Fleischer conducted his struggle for artistic liberty privately, Huston was the famously studio-stymied genius of Lillian Ross’s Picture and ran wild in Ireland with his horses and hated Beverly Hills, and so contemporary critics were not kind to the The Last Run.

The Last Run

Fleischer was no mere docile company stooge, however. As he details in his 1993 autobiography Just Tell Me When to Cry, after the succès d’estime of Compulsion, he decamped to work in Europe, far away from the heart of the biz and its meddling producers. Following an ill-fated tenure with Darryl Zanuck, who had left Fox and set up shop as an independent producer in Paris, De Laurentiis came calling for Fleischer, and he hightailed it down to De Laurentiis’s Rome studio. The offices were located on “a dreary, industrial slum on the Via della Vasca Navale” next to a Gypsy encampment. Despite the unpromising digs, De Laurentiis had Samuel Bronstein–sized ambitions, and he built Jerusalem and the Praetorium from the ground up for Fleischer on several hundred acres of grassland in the Mezzogiorno which would later become his studio, nicknamed Dinocitta. (After Barabbas premiered in June of ’62, Fleischer had the longest lean period of his own career, not directing again until 1966’s Fantastic Voyage.)

The ancient world that production designer Mario Chiari re-created at times looks chintzier than its $10 million budget—the tomb where Christ is buried, for example, is a pile of broken-up cement. There is more veracity to the scenes of the coliseum, filmed in Verona, or the sulfur mines, filmed near the volcanic Mount Etna, and introduced in a panoramic shot that must have looked well and truly astonishing in one of the 70mm “Super Technirama 70” roadshow prints. Fleischer’s first widescreen production was Walt Disney Productions’ CinemaScope 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (54), and in the years to follow he would remain one of the foremost poets of the anamorphic frame. He used it not only for epic sweep, but as a plane that could be broken into individual quadrants of action (most experimentally in The Boston Strangler), or with sections blocked off to develop genuine isolation and claustrophobia, as in the mine sequences, permeated with a steamy yellow dust and hemmed in with a gridwork of wood struts.

Barabbas’s demerits are typical to international productions shot on Italian soil at the time. There is inconsistent ESL from the principals (Gassman is very good; Silvana Mangano, De Laurentiis’s wife who plays Barabbas’s converted ex-lover, is not), and badly integrated, clamorous overdubbing from the secondary players. Close your eyes and some of the barked dialogue could come from a Spaghetti Western from a few years later. (“You got a man here who can hang him with his own guts. He came out of that prison mad. Acquitted, but mad.”) Open them and you’ll see cobra-faced Jack Palance, later a regular of those same Spaghetti Westerns, as a giggling sociopathic gladiator who three times has been granted freedom by the Emperor, and three times has returned to kill more.

It’s the contention of Barabbas that the pre-Christian era was a period of sustained, universal bloodlust, while the movie has fallen victims to our prejudices about its own era. Just as music docs addressing the pre-punk scene must get in an obligatory crack at early Seventies prog bloat—usually a talking head saying something about “endless” guitar solos and a cut to footage of a drummer with a 200-piece kit—so American movies before New Hollywood must necessarily be creaky, antiquated spectacles: The Sound of Music and Cleopatra and, yes, Doctor Doolittle. As ever, the truth of matters is more complicated than that. Barabbas, which has all the hallmarks of a decadent costume pageant of the Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, runaway-production, Two Weeks in Another Town era, is upon closer examination an inextricable mixture of reactionary and radical elements. The latter include the unorthodox approach to religious subject matter, Nascimbene’s experimental score, and the focus on a coarse, “unlikable protagonist”—a type so much esteemed today—who remains unreconstructed for practically the entire movie. (Here Fellini’s La Strada, in which Quinn also starred, is a helpful analogue.) Like Fleischer’s oeuvre as a whole, it’s ripe for reconsideration—the Greatest Story Ever Told has been Retold and Retold, but Barabbas brings it back from the dead.

If you were ever irritated by Wes Anderson’s tendency to make the world resemble a doll’s house, The Grand Budapest Hotel will really get under your skin. Last month at the Berlin Film Festival, the miniature model of the titular establishment, used in the film—a pink-and-white wedding-cake palace—was placed on display in the lobby of the Hotel Adlon. A hotel within a hotel—you can hardly get more Andersonian. Then there’s one of the posters: people often object to Anderson using actors as mere puppets, and here the film’s stars are reduced even further to a mere cartoon of dramatis personae—17 actors rendered in stylized head-and-shoulders likenesses, like cigarette cards.

In a favorable review of The Grand Budapest Hotel in The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy suggests that Anderson’s approach “may well seem off-putting and weird to the general public.” That seems not to be the case: Anderson’s film took $800,000 domestically in its opening weekend, screening at only four theaters, making it his most successful opening to date; it also earned £1.53 million on its U.K. opening. The great wager that Anderson makes and wins in The Grand Budapest Hotel is that a piece of film art can be extremely refined, artificed, and calibrated virtually to the point of being mechanical—yet can still accommodate emotional content, even if that content communicates itself on a rather indirect, rarefied level. The Grand Budapest Hotel is an extremely funny film, though the humor may have you chuckling mutedly, one eyebrow arched, rather than guffawing. It’s also a very sad film, charged with a nostalgic melancholy that is part of its very structure. This is a film about the past, the disappearance of societies and times, and the fragility of memory, all addressed within the context of the modern history of an imaginary European nation.

The film starts, appropriately, in a graveyard: a title announces that we’re in Zubrowka, “on the furthest eastern borders of the European continent—once the seat of an empire.” A young girl in a beret, greatcoat, and punk T-shirt enters the cemetery and gazes at a monument to “Our National Treasure”—a bronze bust of a man, on the plinth of which admirers have hung hotel keys in tribute. She is reading a copy of this man’s novel The Grand Budapest Hotel, and we cut to the unnamed Author (Tom Wilkinson) narrating his story to camera in 1985. He recounts how, years before, his young self (Jude Law) had stayed at the once legendary and luxurious spa hotel, which had already fallen into Soviet-era decrepitude (both incarnations magnificently designed by Adam Stockhausen): the foyer, soon to be seen in its former cathedral-like vastness, has been boxed in with a false ceiling, the erstwhile purple and scarlet splendor replaced by functional, tawdry green and orange; what once was marble is now Bakelite. In the hotel’s crumbling baths, the young author meets the hotel’s mysterious elderly proprietor, Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham)—and it’s his narration over dinner that evokes the hotel’s last days of glory in the early Thirties.

The film, in chapters, recounts the apprenticeship of young Zero (Tony Revolori), then an eager lobby boy, to the effortlessly soigné, flamboyantly cynical, yet impeccably charismatic Gustave H., who is not only the most accomplished of concierges but a beloved gigolo to the aged grandes dames who frequent the establishment. At the heart of the film, then, is a picaresque bildungsroman, but Anderson takes his time in getting to that heart, taking us through four levels of narration before we reach the central story, which therefore has the status of a half-remembered dream, or of a tall tale improvised on the spot.

This structure is an example of Anderson’s perennial passion for frames, boxes, and other distancing devices (The Royal Tenenbaums was similarly presented as the film of an apocryphal novel). The Grand Budapest Hotel begins with a process that effectively unwraps the gift box of Anderson’s confection, layer by layer, until we get to the bejeweled goodie within. In fact, the film is the inverse of the hotel itself: where that stately establishment is all glitter and grandeur on the outside, with some squalor and mundanity within (Gustave’s own quarters are cramped, monastic), the story’s “wrapping” is as plain as it can be, taking us from the drabness of modern Zubrowka, to the glum nadir of the hotel’s decline, finally to the dreamlike splendor of old. The film is like a diamond wrapped in an old newspaper, covered in a further layer of plain brown paper, then in a plastic supermarket bag.

As we know, Anderson has a thing about partitioning: look at the complex geometry of the homes in The Royal Tenenbaums (02) and Moonrise Kingdom (12), or the Mondrian-like division into rectangles of the train compartments in The Darjeeling Limited (07). Here too everything is about boxes and enclosures, and their eventual opening (even the leather coat worn by Willem Dafoe’s murderous goon reveals a secret pocket). The hotel is mirrored in other hyper-organized spaces: the museum where Jeff Goldblum’s Deputy Kovacs meets his end; the dark, crypt-like interiors of the chateau of Tilda Swinton’s ancient dowager (it’s filled, at the reading of her will, by hordes of black-clad grotesques à la Charles Addams: this is the closest Anderson has come to making a Tim Burton film); and the prison from which Gustave makes an escape that’s orchestrated magnificently as a chaotic but mechanical comic fugue. All these spaces are prisons in their way, not least the hotel: what are its guests if not inmates, its liveried staff if not wardens?

In this universe, everything comes in boxes, figuratively and literally: the interior of a train sleeping car is as neatly “gridded” as the front page of the local newspaper. The world is even filled literally with boxes, the bright pink packages from Mendl’s Patisserie; when Zero and his beloved (Saoirse Ronan) fall through the roof of a Mendl’s truck, they find themselves in a box full of boxes. (In his preface to Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Wes Anderson Collection, novelist Michael Chabon compares Anderson’s mania with framing to that of artist Joseph Cornell: a “magic” method for capturing the fragments of a lost, perhaps imagined world).

It seemed that Anderson’s mania for hyper-detailed geometric perfection had gone as far as it could in Moonrise Kingdom; after that, surely he’d have to loosen up. But no—in The Grand Budapest Hotel, he’s gone further, embraced his fetish with absolute exuberance, and made his most explicit and unashamed celebration of artifice to date. Not everyone, as Todd McCarthy says, will like it. And that’s a point that the film concedes with some wit: this is partly a story about people “not getting it,” not realizing that they’re living in a fragile fake utopia that’s about to evaporate. (The film’s belated belle époque is not a utopia for all: for the hotel patrons, yes, but not for servants like the immigrant Zero, who has come from a brutal background, his village razed to the ground in a war.) And this is a story about people not realizing the value of what lies around them. The plot is built around the pursuit of a supposedly priceless and magnificent painting, Boy with Apple by one Johannes van Hoytl. All the other paintings in the room, Gustave opines, are worthless junk—but that junk includes an apocryphal, and very raunchy, Egon Schiele canvas that meets a bad end, lost to history in the flash of one character’s temper.

If The Grand Budapest Hotel turns to be Anderson’s most popular film, it will also be the point at which non-admirers declare most vociferously that they have had enough. In the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews complained that the film was about as nourishing as a crate of Fabergé eggs: “not a sustaining calorie, narrative or dramatic, in sight.” Kyle Buchanan on Vulture complained that the director’s and DP Robert Yeoman’s increasing obsession with rectilinear blocking (“Wes Anderson characters have lost the ability to walk in diagonal lines”) makes “[Anderson’s] movie world . . . flatter than ever.” The harshest critique comes from David Thomson in The New Republic, who sees The Grand Budapest Hotel as “a rococo dead end, a ferment of decoration, unwitting complacency and ignorance.” Not the least of his complaints is that Anderson credits the film as inspired by the writings of Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), which seems to have offended him as presumptuous in the same way that some of us thought it was cheeky for Lars von Trier to dedicate his Antichrist to Tarkovsky.

Thomson accuses Anderson of “indifference to the depth of experience that preoccupied Zweig,” and perhaps he has a point insofar as The Grand Budapest Hotel seems only tenuously connected to Zweig’s writing. The filmmaker has said that he was inspired partly by the hotel setting of Zweig’s story “The Post Office Girl,” and by the device of the level-by-level approach to a narrative core, a method hardly peculiar to Zweig. Personally, I feel that an overall flavor of Zweig is simply one layer of resemblance in the film: that the theme of servitude in old Europe’s service industry is far more reminiscent of Bohumil Hrabal’s 1971 novel I Served the King of England (filmed in 2006 by Jiri Menzel). I also get strong bouquets of another Austrian writer, Joseph Roth (notably, his end-of-empire novel The Radetzky March), of Hergé’s Tintin adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre, plus Josef Lada’s illustrations to The Good Soldier Svejk. Then there is another avowed influence of Anderson’s, the cycle of Thirties and Forties Hollywood films about a half-imagined, half-remembered Europe created by émigré directors: Wilder, Sternberg, Mamoulian et al.

Thomson delivers a crushingly harsh verdict on Anderson’s film: “It relates to the atmosphere and texture of Stefan Zweig like an achingly sweet pastry on a tin plate at Auschwitz-Birkenau.” There’s a long, complex debate to be had on the question of whether it is appropriate or adequate to view the horrors of modern history through a lens of humor or indeed whimsy—a debate that would have to span from To Be or Not to Be and The Great Dictator to their echo in the Zig-Zag militia in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

If you take a moralizing view, then yes, it could be considered unforgivably trivializing both of European history and of Zweig’s own experience to portray Nazi-like figures as cartoons, eight decades after Lubitsch’s and Chaplin’s films. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is, in any case, about something other than good people and snarling baddies, for its heroes are deeply flawed and deluded. Gustave is vain, arrogant, supercilious, venal, and a liar, not least to himself: he vows never to part with the precious painting he has inherited from his dead mistress, then almost, in the same breath, makes plans to sell it and escape to luxury. The film ends with elderly Zero paying homage to his mentor as the last bastion of civilization in a world increasingly becoming barbaric—although Anderson’s tabletop-model Europe, with its miniature mock-Nazis, is hardly as brutal as the real 20th century. But Anderson is only too aware of the place of fantasy in his picture, as the older Zero remarks of Gustave: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it. But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.”

Anderson’s “world of yesterday” (to use the title of Zweig’s memoir) has not merely vanished—it never really existed. It’s a gorgeous, fastidious reconstruction of a dream, and that glittery chimera contains its own material and moral rot, its own deep sadness and horror (look how many characters die in the film, and how horribly). It may have been superfluous for Anderson to flag up his homage to Zweig in the credits, but it’s honest of him. To find him wanting in comparison to that writer’s seriousness and depth of feeling is beside the point. The nostalgia for a lost world that never was is more acute in The Grand Budapest Hotel than in any of Anderson’s films, and it’s the flippancy of the whole enterprise, the dandyish panache so resembling Gustave’s, that makes the superficiality so poetic—or if you like, so paradoxically deep. It is a film that maintains its illusion with grace—and ruefully unmasks that illusion every bit as gracefully.

Item of the day: Elaine May and husband Stanley Donen have co-written a comedy about filmmaking to be produced by Mike Nichols. A private reading took place recently featuring Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin, and Jeannie Berlin … Larry Clark has been up to his old tricks, this time in Paris, with The Small of Us, yet another movie about skateboarding youth, featuring Michael Pitt and a cast of unknowns. After a troubled shoot last summer in which several cast members were summarily fired and which was described by one producer as “the greatest challenge of [Clark’s] career,” it seems likely to finally surface at Cannes. Let’s hope it’s more Kids than Wassup Rockers … Also headed to Cannes is André Téchiné’s thriller L’Homme que l’on aimait trop, based on the real-life 1977 disappearance of a woman who manages a casino in Nice. Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet co-star …

Otar Iosseliani is starting work on his next film, Chant d'hiver, with the help of France’s advances-on-receipts production fund. Other recipients include Jean-Paul Rappeneau for his project Belles familles; Louis Garrel, whose Les Deux amis will team the writer-director with Vincent Macaigne; and Christophe Honoré … Michael Caine will star in Paolo Sorrentino’s In the Future, a drama about “friendship between two old people” … Abdellatif Kechiche is contemplating another helping of wrenching romantic anguish with a movie version of Héloïse et Abélard … Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are currently shooting an adaptation of Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints, with Ethan Hawke and Hailee Steinfeld, about a young man (played by Hugo star Asa Butterfield) who moves in with his estranged father in Manhattan in 1987 at the height of the East Village punk scene …

Jim Jarmusch is rumored to be planning an opera, and hopes to be shooting his next feature this fall … Steven Soderbergh is producing David Gordon Green’s made-for-TV film Red Oaks. Let’s hope Green’s Suspiria remake stays on the back burner … Next up for Oculus director Mike Flanagan is Diver, a supernatural thriller about a secret project in which crime investigators enter the minds of the recently dead to experience their final memories ... Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, and Benoît Poelvoorde co-star in Benoît Jacquot’s next film, Three Hearts, in a love triangle between a man and two sisters …

And Most Pointless Remake of the Week prize goes to Michael Bay for his update of The Birds, relocated to England, the original setting of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 novelette, and to be directed by the memorably named Diederik van Rooijen. The film’s producers have pledged that the film will be a more faithful adaptation than Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, but so far it’s taken seven screenwriters and counting to get there …

3/5/14 ... Terrence Malick’s unfinished 2008 project Voyage of Time, a documentary about “the whole of time, from the birth of the universe to its final collapse” will finally be completed after the resolution of a legal wrangle with its financiers. Brad Pitt and Emma Thompson, will narrate the film … Marcel Ophüls is planning a film about Ernst Lubitsch to star Dustin Hoffman, with Jeanne Moreau as Lubitsch’s private secretary ... Errol Morris is underway on Holland, Michigan, a narrative feature starring Naomi Watts, Bryan Cranston, and Edgar Ramirez ... David Fincher is re-teaming with producer Scott Rudin and writer Aaron Sorkin on a Steve Jobs biopic based on Walter Isaacson’s biography and structured around three pivotal moments in Jobs’s life ... Hot from HBO’s True Detective, Cary Fukunaga is directing Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, a drama about child soldiers in Ghana ...

Warren Beatty is finally getting his chance to play Howard Hughes in long-held passion project Rules Don’t Apply, which the actor wrote and will direct—and it only took Ron Burkle, Steve Bing, Terry Semel, Arnon Milchan, and Brett Ratner to scrape together the tiny $26.7 million budget to get it off the ground ... Weekend director Andrew Haigh’s follow-up film is 45 Years. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay co-star as a married couple about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary when news comes that the body of the husband’s first love has been discovered, frozen and preserved in the Swiss Alps ... And if you want to see a film directed by Alan Rickman, watch out for A Little Chaos starring Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts ... And this week’s most stupid remake is  the pointless “reboot” of Point Break to be directed by someone called Ericson Core, who seems to think that Gerard Butler can fill Patrick Swayze’s shoes.

Bertrand Tavernier is one of a small number of working filmmakers capable of juggling a prolific career behind the camera (he has been making films steadily for the past 40 years) with an equally accomplished double life as a critic and film scholar. With Jean-Pierre Coursodon, he is the author of the monumental, 1,300-page compendium 50 Years of American Cinema, in addition to a lengthy history of writing for Positif, Cahiers du cinéma, and this magazine. His body of work as a director spans a dizzying range of genres: among many others, politically loaded crime drama (The Clockmaker, his 1974 debut), police procedural (L.627, 92), historical romance (The Princess of Montpensier, 10), World War II epic (Life and Nothing But, 89), and jazz film (’Round Midnight, 86, starring Dexter Gordon and Herbie Hancock).

Quai d’Orsay—titled The French Minister in its U.S. release—is a breathless catalogue of backroom political storms and stresses centered on a young, ambitious speechwriter working for an eccentric foreign minister. It’s also Tavernier’s first all-out comedy, and he approaches the genre with a fine eye for character and a careful sense of pace. With its rapid-fire dialogue exchanges and its string of pressure-cooker crises—set to the lively tempo of Philippe Sarde’s terrific score—the film is as close to the territory of classic American screwball comedy as it is to the political landscape of contemporary France. Tavernier adapted the movie from a graphic novel by Christophe Blain and Antonin Baudry—the latter a former speechwriter under the legendary minister Dominique de Villepin, whose 2003 address to the United Nations against the Iraq War is quoted directly in the film.

FILM COMMENT spoke with Tavernier about his parallel lives as a director and film buff, his approach to structure and rhythm, his love for Howard Hawks and Jacques Becker, and the unseen logic behind the apparent chaos of a film set.

The theme of this conversation—in keeping with the pace of your new film—was initially going to be “the world’s fastest screwball comedies,” so I wanted to start with a general question: what considerations, in your experience, go into determining the speed of a movie?

Difficult question. First, I must say one thing. When I start working on a film, I stop being a film buff. I very rarely see films to influence either my work, or the work of my collaborators. I want to stick to the film I’m doing and the characters, without thinking about other films. Of course, when I’m doing a comedy like Quai d’Orsay, I have in mind the rhythm of great comedies like His Girl Friday, To Be or Not to Be, or Billy Wilder’s films. I didn’t need to see any of them again. I also had in mind something that Hawks said: a good comedy is a comedy which could, with a few changes, be directed in a more straightforward, even dramatic manner. You could take the screenplay of Quai d’Orsay and with a few adjustments—not so many—you could have a good dramatic film. After all, it’s a film which deals with a potential war, with—at one point—a cargo which is going to explode and maybe kill a few million people, and the danger of civil war in Africa. It’s all very serious.

I also had in mind, as I said earlier, the rhythm, the pace. The pace of a film—especially of a comedy—must come from one or two main characters. I have seen films, especially recent films, where the directors try to stick with a single kind of pace because everybody told them that the audience is impatient, so you have to move fast. The film is trying to move faster than the characters. Or the film is always moving at the same speed, which is, for me, the opposite of real rhythm. Rhythm must include—even if they’re only 20 or 30 seconds—moments when you break the rhythm. The speed had to come from the character of the minister, who was always in movement, always running, unable to sit down for two minutes, unable not to do anything. The rhythm also had to come organically from the character of Arthur, who always has to do something but is always rebuffed. What he does is ignored and thrown away, so he has to start again and start again. I had to get that feeling in the rhythm, and I think I got it. The rhythm of the film is really imposed, dictated, and determined organically by the character—like in The Princess of Montpensier, or L.627, or Capitaine Conan [96].

Part of what’s interesting about that dynamic in Quai d’Orsay is that you have one character within the film imposing a rhythm on another character. So, to some degree, for the rhythm to feel natural, it has to feel forced.

Yes. And the rhythm is always stopping when you come to the character played by Niels Arestrup, who is always slowing the scenes down, speaking slowly…

Falling asleep…

And falling asleep. It’s like he’s saying, “You move too fast. Stop, think, wait, we’ll find a solution.” And that’s good. He’s always doing things—reading, signing, talking on the phone, or absorbing huge stacks of files—but just a shot with him, or three lines from him, allows me from time to time to break the rhythm and the speed of the film.

That’s one of the respects in which the film reminds me of certain classic Hollywood comedies. They always include all this buffer space, passages that absorb the shock of the manic stretches surrounding them.

Especially films like His Girl Friday or One, Two, Three.   

These very quiet, hushed, slow scenes—like the exchange in His Girl Friday between Rosalind Russell and the imprisoned man.

Yes. It’s surprising how dramatic the background of that film is—it’s the death penalty—and you laugh all the time.

In some sense, it’s those quiet buffer scenes that really end up being the dramatic core of the movie.

Yeah. There was another director I was thinking of, without seeing the films—because, again, making a film is so exciting, so demanding, and so involving that I don’t want to see other images. But I was remembering some of the comedies of Jacques Becker. I know he’s not known in this country, and it’s a pity, because for me he is, if not the greatest, then one of the greatest French directors of the Forties and Fifties. One of the greatest. One of the most underrated in this country. I know they re-released Antoine et Antoinette recently, which is a masterpiece, but Edouard et Caroline is a wonderful comedy: very, very funny, with tremendous space, and some moments when it suddenly becomes serious. Just at the end, there’s a moment when it could become a drama. It’s done with such grace and elegance in the direction.

I find Becker the equal of—if not better than—even people like Hawks. He had such a wide range: going from Casque d’or to Edouard et Caroline, or from Antoine et Antoinette to Touchez pas au grisbi to Le Trou. An enormous range, and always with the same deeply organic quality. He was doing things which were extremely bold and extremely new, but they were done so fluidly that nobody noticed how new it was. The character of Gabin in Touchez pas au grisbi, for instance, pre-dates all the antiheroes of the Sixties and Seventies: in the way he’s macho with women, or the way he wants to go to bed early. It's a destruction of Gabin’s image, and of the whole romantic image of the hero. This gangster is just a bourgeois who wants to have a bourgeois wife and doesn’t want to sleep late or have any problems. That was incredibly daring with somebody like Gabin. There are very few actors who were willing to challenge their own image like that: he had the reputation of being the great seducer, the romantic guy, the hero of all the prewar films. And then he was playing the opposite. I love that.

One thing that might unite Becker and Hawks is that they didn’t primarily make comedies.

Becker started with dramas. His first film is a kind of tongue-in-cheek gangster film, but his second is a murder drama set in the country. He was, by the way, a great admirer of Hawks and Hathaway. During the first Cahiers interview with Hawks, Becker was present in the room.

Do you think that the way these directors made comedies was somehow affected by the fact that they spent so much of their careers making dramatic films?

Maybe. Coming out of directing dramas, they had a kind of elegant style which was very well suited for comedy. And maybe by doing those dramas, they knew how to transform a dramatic scene into a comedy.

The comedies are always threatening to become dramas.

Yeah. I don’t know if that’s true of all Hawks, though: I’m not sure I Was a Male War Bride could have been a dramatic film.

Another striking aspect of Quai d’Orsay for me is structural: for increasingly long stretches of the movie—during the crisis with the ship, for instance—the film leaves Arthur altogether.

He would have been useless. He is there with the other advisors, and there’s a moment between him and Valerie, but there’s no possibility for him to help solve the thing. I do not care about losing a character. You get him back, and you get him back with a very good scene. And at that moment, the audience has absorbed the fact that, more or less, even if he’s not present, he is getting everything that’s happening. He is slowly becoming a member of the cabinet, so he doesn’t have to be present to know what’s happening.

I find your question strange, because there are so many novels and plays in which you lose a character for 20 minutes. I love freedom. I love to be able to do what I want, not to follow a pattern where, when you have a main character, he has to be there in every moment. I’ve never made films where the screenplay is dictated by the plot. Especially in many of the latest films I’ve made, I want to give the impression that the screenplay is written by the characters. My films are often very collective; even if you have one, two, or three main parts, every character counts. I can jump from one to the other; I want to be able to build a whole film—Safe Conduct [02]—on two heroes who practically never meet. I want to have the possibility of making that. It gives me a very free dramatic construction, where I can jump from one character to the other.

I’m suffering from everything that’s predictable: films that look like they’re coming from a three-act screenplay, or that have twists which seem to be dictated by the screenwriters and imposed on the characters. I want to get rid of all that. I want to enjoy the freedom of narration.

Part of the effect in this case is that you get the sense that the characters are always reacting to events out in the world.

Absolutely. Sometimes it’s a challenge. In L.627, if I wanted to be true to the essence of the work of the police squad, I had to accept the fact that they will fail at one thing, start another investigation, and change gears suddenly to follow something unexpected. The story was starting over all the time. Normally, that’s something that screenwriters hate. I had to accept it and ask myself: “What can I do to overcome something that can be problematic for the audience?” I had to be able to understand the state of mind of people for whom nothing is ever finished. The moment they think they can have some rest, they have to start again; they have to work. If you deal with that frontally, if you accept it, you can overcome the problem, even make what could have been a problem into a virtue. You find a kind of narrative which will be exciting, providing you put a lot of gusto and energy into it, and providing never waste time indulging yourself. I did it in L.627, Capitaine Conan, and Safe Conduct, and I knew it could work here too. They’re doing 20 things at the same time, but in the end, we must feel the progression even if what they’ve tried to do has stopped or failed. It’s something I liked in the graphic novel: you finish one thing, and you have another problem immediately, or two problems at the same time. You have to start all over again.

I think that contributes here to the film’s sense of humor as well.

Yeah, the repetition can be a source of fun.

Another element that contributes to the tone is the very inventive use of language: everyone’s talking past each other and over each other’s heads.

It’s something that Robert Altman did brilliantly. He’s one of my heroes in many ways. In Tanner ’88 or Nashville, he’s doing that constantly. Gregory La Cava, too, in Stage Door.

How did you make sure the comic impact of the language would carry over from the graphic novel?

I think the characters were very well written in the graphic novel. It was very funny; at the same time, it felt true. That was the story of the writer’s life. He told, very simply, what happened to him. And you can feel that. I wanted to preserve the energy of the novel, not to copy the way it was ordered. This is the trap. A graphic novel is not a storyboard. You must understand what is great in it, and sometimes that will mean finding solutions which are the opposite of what is actually in the graphic novel. I can just give you a detail: in the novel, I looked at Christophe Blain’s wonderful drawings, and in some of them, the foreign minister is moving so fast that he has five or six arms, like an Indian god. Papers are flying. I had to keep this idea, but I didn’t want to do any kind of special effect. Instead, I had him walk as if he was preceded by a kind of mini-storm. He’s like the character in Peanuts who is always followed by dust. When he comes into a room, everything flies, and he never has any kind of look towards what’s happening around him.

One of the great foreign affairs ministers, when he saw the film, said: “That is a wonderful idea. It gives the right color to the character. He doesn’t leave anything concrete; he’s so far away in his own vision that he never sees that he’s bothering everybody. He’s living in another dimension.”

He sets the rhythm of the space, but he’s also constantly disrupting it.

Totally. He creates an enormous chaos around him. Sometimes, when I was doing the film, I thought: “My God, it’s a fable about filmmaking.” Some directors seem to create a huge chaos on the set, but in the end, when you see the finished film, it has tremendous logic. It was very late, during the editing, that I discovered that in his brilliant speech in front of the council of security—which is a real speech—the minister is using all the formulas which he has been repeating throughout the film. It sounds absurd when he gives these lists—“ténacité,” et cetera—but in the end, they are all in the speech, and they make sense. It’s as if he tries out a lot of formulas verbally, and then, having created a lot of chaos around him, succeeds in doing something which is structured, organized, and incredibly well written—the most brilliant speech in French diplomacy for two or three decades. It was vilified in this country at the time, but he was totally right. Everything which was in the speech is now timeless. It’s precise, intelligent, true and wise. During the whole film, you would have a problem attributing those adjectives to the character of the minister.

That was what attracted me to the story: that the politics of individuals are more important than their behavior or their crazy way of talking. Politicians can only be judged by their effects—not by the way they dress, talk, or scream, or the fact that they contradict themselves, say stupid things, or sound emphatic and arrogant. They can be all of that if, at the end, the result is terrific. In exactly the same way, some directors can seem nasty or mean; others want to change their screenplay whenever they meet somebody. But in the end, something will happen, and it will be great.

The widespread adoption of digital projection systems officially ushered in an age that redefines the physical basis of “motion pictures.” The visual phenomenon described by the term puts the emphasis on the endangered medium of film—translucent strips of celluloid or acetate stocks made up of discrete, still images, which pass before a projector lamp. Yet as several works shown in Anthology Film Archives’ recent “Motion(less) Pictures” program demonstrate, motion pictures in a literal sense have another tradition grounded in the animation of still photographs.

Film has long explored the illusion of movement created through the rapid sequencing of still frames, from cel and stop-motion animation to, in the first film shown in the series, Chris Marker’s 1962 short La Jetée.  Other films in the program animate images through more unusual means, whether by alternating between stereographic views to produce the sensation of movement in Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (from 2006) and Nymph (2007), or, more literally, by burning photographs on a hotplate in Hollis Frampton’s 1971 Hapax Legomena 1: (nostalgia).

La Jetée

As with the above works by Jacobs, this avenue of cinematic exploration has continued to expand and even thrive in digital video that recapitulates the illusion of movement constructed by film free of its material basis. Within Anthology’s program, Lucy Raven’s 2009 China Town and Peter Bo Rappmund’s Vulgar Fractions from 2011, are the two works most closely concerned with the types of movement that can be created through the sequencing of still images.

For the making of China Town, Raven assembled over 7000 images to track the movement of copper from its pit-mine extractions in the western United States to its manufacture into light-bulb filament wire in China. In her photography, she frequently stands at a panoramic distance to survey her subjects: dusty explosions in wide frame as they bloom, rust-colored, in bulldozed pits; the passage of a train on the horizon, shortening not in one fluid movement but in segmented jumps; or an immense, mostly empty turbine room filled with blue cylinder generators, each of them neatly numbered, in a plant powered by the Three Gorges Dam. Much of the movement we perceive is attributable to the position of Raven’s camera, which moves slightly between exposures, each frame a slight adjustment to the view.

China Town

In closer views, more frequently of interiors or people at work, the rate of Raven’s photography often quickens enough for the scenes to spring to a kind of stilted life. In one sequence, set in a tunnel illuminated by orange light, chunks of rock hurtle by on a conveyor belt, monitored by a female worker in a hard hat. The blur of the stones produced in the low-light conditions offer, instead of motion pictures, pictures of motion. In another shot, a woman stands inside a money booth at a casino, trying to gather in her arms the dollar bills fluttering around her. Even with these faster sequences, where the intervals between frames are shorter, there is still a sense of halting unevenness. Though somewhat smoothed over by the film’s soundtrack, which was recorded without interruption in the field (Raven made separate sound recordings), the motion of an excavator chewing into the pit face or a group of men inspecting the giant tires of their equipment still appears as if rendered in flipbook form.

The effect is both jarring and hypnotic. Raven’s method of “photographic animation,” as she has called it, maintains the overall sequential coherence of the activity, but the broken-up movement makes us keenly aware of the gaps cleaving the action being portrayed—or, in other words, everything that’s missing from view. The presentation mimics the physical apparatus of film, whose 24 frames per second (or in some cases 16 or 18 frames) are broken by the blade of the shutter, momentarily filling the screen with darkness in the spaces between frames. China Town’s gaps, on the other hand, are only virtual, occurring not in its shutterless digital projection but as part of its manner of production. And while the intervals between film frames typically pass too quickly for most viewers to detect any absence, the missing spaces are in some ways the most salient feature of Raven’s work. China Town invokes film mechanics to reflect on the ways film and digital media create meaning in both what appears on screen and what is implied by the unseen interval.

China Town

In this way, Raven brings the structural underpinnings of her motion pictures to bear on a political economy. Through its photographs, China Town depicts, in similarly sequenced stages, the transformation and transportation of raw copper as it circulates globally. Yet with both Raven’s technique and the industrial process she describes, the pronounced emphasis on the intervals between frames suggests how much of the story we might be missing, or how much Raven herself was barred access to the sometimes politically sensitive sites she was attempting to document. As with Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, another film about the movement of an industrial resource, we know there is another story lurking within the gaps of the one we’re given. One of these accounts, not expressed explicitly in Raven’s film but indicated by the history of the Nevada mine of its earliest scenes, is the informal name “Chinatown” once used to describe the surrounding areas, where many Chinese laborers lived and worked.

Vulgar Fractions uses the same technique of animating still frames, but for markedly different aims. Instead of China Town’s concern with gaps in filmic and industrial production, Rappmund uses these spaces to convey long stretches of historical time. The movie traverses the borders of Nebraska to investigate the various ways cartographic lines are rendered in the landscape, whether with wire fencing, tombstone-like markers, signs inscribed as “witness posts,” or simply the edges of forests and fields. Shot in stunning photographic tableaux that are like aestheticized topographical surveys, Vulgar Fractions is attentive to the subtle waving of flaxen grasses as well as the decay gradually worn onto a stone edifice. The intervals between photographs vary, as they do in China Town, but here the frames, snapped from a tripod-steadied camera, vary little. In some cases, the changes between frames are so slight so as to be imperceptible, save for the time-lapsed passage of time. Adding to the sense of desolation, there is little evidence of human inhabitants, save the weathervanes, a smashed and half-buried television monitor, and other traces left behind in what appears as a forgotten, if not entirely abandoned, land.

Vulgar Fractions

In one sequence of stills, Vulgar Fractions cuts from a wide shot of a gray hillside dotted with deer to a hazy close-up of a doe. The movie abruptly shifts registers, sacrificing its crisp HD resolution for a blurry detail. As the photographer of Antonioni’s Blow-Up learned through grainy magnification, getting close-up to your subject does not render it any clearer. Rather, the deer in the center of the frame becomes all the more difficult to perceive. Instead of a sharp, refocused still in the manner of the other close-ups in Vulgar Fractions, we’re shown a fuzzy, distorted portion from a previously displayed image, one we’d had no reason to question. The blown-up image ends up revealing the inadequacy of the camera for fully conveying, or “capturing,” what it sees. Seen in this light, Vulgar Fractions becomes an invitation to consider not only the gaps suggested between stills, but areas of obscurity contained within the image, as well.

Raven and Rappmund’s works suggest that any image, and not just those held on screen at an unusually slow frame rate, is suggestive of the gaps that surround it, though we are not typically aware of their presence. Through these uses of photographic animation, we’re given more room to imagine what happens in the spaces between frames. In the process, we’re confronted with our own compulsion to see, and perhaps even to possess, the ungraspable images that pass before us.

C.Y. Leung, Hong Kong's new Chief Executive, has turned out to be the most unifying politician in Hong Kong history, inspiring massive waves of hatred across the population. From a political point of view, it sucks to be in Hong Kong right now, as the local offices of Chinese companies force their employees to fill out fake opinion forms, and newspaper editors are attacked in the street. But from a cultural point of view, this is the most exciting thing to happen to Hong Kong art since Wong Jing convinced Simon Yam to eat a wiener.

The first sustained signs of financial stability for the Hong Kong film industry after its crash in the mid-Nineties was its sudden access to the Mainland Chinese market. Under the CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement) in 2003, Hong Kong movies were no longer classified as foreign films as long as they passed censorship requirements, and a massive new market was born. Suddenly, every Hong Kong distributor was shooting a period martial-arts movie with major stars on the Mainland. But as this market got glutted, some directors began to turn local, making movies rooted in Hong Kong culture for the tiny, Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong audience. Once, this audience determined tastes for the entire Asia Pacific region. Today it's a minority group.

Movies like Pang Ho-cheung's Vulgaria (2012), about the Hong Kong porn industry, and horror movie Tales from the Dark (2013) could never be released in China due to their content, but they heralded a return to a defiantly local filmmaking style: Hong Kong movies for Hong Kong people. Vulgaria won tons of local awards and dominated the box office, while Tales was the first film from veteran producer Bill Kong's new Hong Kong-centric production company. These movies signaled a bigger sea change, however, as Hong Kongers—sick of rising real estate prices (driven by Mainlanders buying property in Hong Kong), wary of interference from Beijing, and angry about new laws—began to take to the streets to defend the Hong Kong way of life. Now, a full-on culture war has broken out. 

Vulgaria

The most obvious battle has been the government's war on Hong Kong TV, probably the world's best television station that doesn't exist. For decades, Hong Kong has been served by two free TV channels (TVB and ATV), and two pay channels (PCCW and i-Cable). ATV has a viewership of approximately zero. TVB, an offshoot of Shaw Brothers, owns the marketplace, broadcasting an increasingly musty collection of creaky dramas which are the closest thing to a wax museum currently on television.

But back in 2009… disruption in the halls of power! Enter Ricky Wong, the self-made billionaire behind City Telecom who broke the monopoly on Hong Kong IDD phone service and pioneered residential broadband. Unlike the long-lived family business dynasties behind TVB, PCCW, and i-Cable, Wong is a self-made man who started out as an electrical engineer and, unlike TVB, he dreamed of making good television. In 2009, he put in an application for a free-to-air television license, followed shortly by copycat applications from PCCW and i-Cable. In 2011, the Broadcasting Authority recommended that all three licenses be issued by the government, and Wong went big, dropping HK$900 million into building a production facility in Tseung Kwan O, hiring 500 employees, and signing about 250 contract artists.

Borderline

Wong wanted to beat the competition on quality. He made his writers attend “television boot camp” watching American shows like Spartacus: Blood & Sand, House of Cards, and Glee, and they responded with enthusiasm. Teams of technicians analyzed Korean, Japanese, and American programming for everything from plot construction to lighting and began to produce hundreds of hours of content. HKTV’s shows weren’t broadcast, but they were presented to buyers and investors who apparently loved them. A full episode of its cop drama, Borderline, was put up on YouTube and almost immediately attracted over 1 million views as well as comparisons to Johnnie To. Although it looks crude to American eyes, trust me, Borderline is a quantum leap for Hong Kong television.

Then, in October 2013, the Executive Council surprised everyone by issuing licenses to PCCW and i-Cable and rejecting HKTV’s application. The decision was made by the Chief Executive in a closed session and no explanation was given. “The news is a shock to us,” Wong said. With no TV license, he was forced to fire 320 people from HKTV. Almost immediately, thousands (the number depends on who you ask: 36,000 say officials, 120,000 say organizers) took to the streets to protest the decision including Andy Lau (who was greeted by cheers of “The Chief Executive speaks!” when he appeared), Anita Yuen, and Ekin Cheng.

In December, Wong announced that he would launch five free internet television channels, doing an end run around the HK government. He planned to start rehiring his fired workers, and was shooting for a July 2014 launch. But three days ago, he was informed that because his internet channels would reach more than 5,000 households, he required a free-to-air license... exactly like the one he’d just been denied. “We’ve reached a dead end,” Wong said. At this point, HKTV is over.

Wong should count himself lucky, because at least he’s not being stabbed or beaten in the streets. (That’s the standard Hong Kong journalists have these days, “At least I’m not being stabbed or beaten in the streets. Hooray!”) Last summer, three masked attackers broke into the offices of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s most irrepresible scandal rags, and burned 26,000 copies of the paper. In June, Chen Ping, publisher of i-Sun which had recently gone online-only, was attacked and beaten by unknown assailants in the streets. And this January, Kevin Lau, the outspoken editor of Ming Pao Daily, was forced to step down. Lau recently announced that he was going to start his own online news service, but on February 26, he was walking to his car when he was attacked and critically wounded by men armed with choppers. 

Thousands of journalists (either 8,600 or 13,000 depending on your source) took to the streets on March 1 to protest these events, carrying a huge banner that read, “They can’t kill us all.” It won’t be for lack of trying.

Protests are exactly what Beijing doesn’t want, and they’re exactly what they’re getting. But while most of their attention is taken up by the constipated Occupy Central movement, which has not actually staged a protest but simply threatened to stage one, young kids are actually injecting a fresh burst of cultural energy with a series of theatrical street actions. One of the first waves came during last summer’s graduation ceremony for students at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (alma mater of actors like Athena Chu and Anthony Wong). C.Y. Leung presided over the ceremony, and students were supposed to pass by him on stage, giving a slight respectful bow before they received their diplomas. Instead, students flipped him the bird as they went by, mooned him, turned their backs on him, shouted for universal sufferage, and bowed to him three times (a funeral tradition). Instead of being shouted down, the students were greeted with cheers and applause as the humiliated Chief Executive was trapped onstage with nothing to do but smile blandly while his security team stood by helplessly.

Kids who were barely alive when Hong Kong was a colony recently marched into the PLA garrison in Hong Kong waving a colonial Hong Kong flag but their juiciest efforts have come in their re-design of Hong Kong’s anti-locust protests. For years, Hong Kongers have been complaining about the influx of Mainland tourists who come to shop and buy property, calling them locusts and occasionally organizing xenophobic protests (in Beijing, an official at the National People’s Congress ominously noted that the issue has “been taken note of”).

But this week, the kids hit Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui dressed as Maoist Red Guards, waving Chinese flags and Little Red Books, singing the Chinese national anthem and chanting, “We love China!” and “If you love China, buy Chinese milk!” in a reference to Mainlanders who come to Hong Kong to buy powdered formula after tainted Mainland formula killed 6 children. It's a refreshing burst of humor and tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, although China Daily, the Mainland news source, was not amused.

But the protests keep getting more theatrical, as protesters clog the streets with fake shopping carts and turn demonstrations into street theater complete with giant puppets, papier-mâché battleships, and costumes.

This is the kind of flamboyant display of political protest that was common in the United States in the Sixties, and it’s something Hong Kong hasn’t seen in, well, maybe ever. It’s especially heartening because it’s this brand of politically charged performance that eventually left the streets and infiltrated America’s cultural institutions, giving birth to influential theater companies like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Bread and Puppet Theater.

Even filmmaking is starting to show signs of fresh air. It’s not much, but the seven-minute YouTube film “Hong Kong Will Be Destroyed in 33 Years” (the title a reference to the fact that in 50 years Hong Kong will no longer be allowed autonomous rule) says pretty much everything that can be said about this nostalgia for the past and how it might change the future. In the film (which has English subtitles), scientists predict that in 33 years an asteroid will hit Hong Kong and destroy it. All the rich people leave, the stock market closes, and everyone with any sense moves to Mainland China. But instead of becoming a ghost town, Hong Kong thrives. Kai Tak Airport, a potent symbol of the old city, re-opens, small businesses fire up again, and Hong Kongers even come up with a way to destroy the approaching meteor. Crude, politically naive, poorly shot, and about as obvious as a blow to the head, it’s still worth watching because it’s got something in it that I haven’t seen in a long time in a film from Hong Kong: hope.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Korea’s SBS has taken its popular reality show, Jjak, off the air after one of the contestants hanged herself on the set, allegedly over pressure she felt from the way her appearance was being edited.

... Bong Joon-ho is producing Sea Fog, the directorial debut of his co-writer from Memories of Murder, Shim Sung-bo. Based on a play, it’s about the Taechangho incident in which a Korean fishing vessel forced 60 illegal Chinese immigrants into its net storage locker where 25 of them suffocated, and were dumped overboard. Slated for a late summer release, Bong describes the movie as "more of a romance."

... Kino Lorber has picked up the catalog formerly belonging to Tartan Asia Extreme's DVD label, and plans to begin releasing the films themselves. Titles include Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy and a ton of horror movies. 

... It’s not just Hayao Miyazaki who’s retired—his longtime producer and former president of Studio Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki, has announced he’s stepping down this year, too.

... Takashi Shimizu talks about his live-action adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s famous 1989 film, Kiki’s Delivery Service.

... You may have felt the earth stop spinning recently as Wong Kar Wai and Wong Jing, representing polar opposites of the Hong Kong film industry, appeared in a photo together at the Hong Kong Film Directors’ Guild dinner. Both Wongs reportedly emerged unscathed from the encounter.

... Hong Kong mega-star Jackie Chan has emerged from the lab having grown a K-pop band of his very own in a nutrient tank. Called JJCC (pronounced “Double JC”) they plan to distinguish themselves from in the field by featuring handsome young men with ripped abs singing power ballads and catchy dance numbers written by sophisticated songwriting software while dancing in unison like robots.

After a long delay, Guilty of Romance and Himizu are finally having their debut theatrical runs in the U.S. The pair signal the end of a self-described “middle period” of Sono’s career, and mark a transition for the director—after a slight detour into post-3/11 melodrama with the well-acted but otherwise lukewarm The Land of Hope (12)—into bigger-budget studio projects. These include the ebullient yakuza action-comedy Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (13; to be released later this year by Drafthouse Films) and the forthcoming rap musical Tokyo Tribe, by early accounts Sono’s biggest film yet.

Picking up on themes introduced in his 2010 serial-killer / horror film Cold Fish (produced under Nikkatsu Studio’s now-defunct genre banner Sushi Typhoon), Sono’s Guilty Of Romance (11) has been described by many as a more female-centered approach to similar material and, like most of Sono’s films, has also been subject to accusations of misogyny. As in Cold Fish, a shy and weak protagonist is ushered into a dark world of murder, sex, and obsession by a knowing, dominant figure who leads two very different lives. In this case, the protagonist is Izumi Kikuchi (former swimsuit model Megumi Kagurazaka, now Mrs. Sono), a quiet and dutiful housewife of famous but emotionally distant novelist Yukio (genre fixture Kanji Tsuda). Bereft of any ambition beyond making sure her husband’s slippers are perfectly positioned when he arrives home every night, Izumi has lived her life in quiet acceptance of her passion-free and sexless marriage, feeling that she’s unworthy of her brilliant, higher-class husband and unwilling to interrupt his creative process with her own needs. But with her 30th birthday on the horizon and an unfamiliar feeling of restlessness rising within her, Izumi begins to keep a journal, and, with Yukio’s blessing, she takes a day job at a grocery store, handing out sausage samples to disinterested customers.

That is, until the day she’s approached by a well-dressed woman who flatteringly invites her to try her hand at “specialty modeling,” promising to help Izumi overcome her shyness and step out of her husband’s shadow while making some money of her own. This all goes downhill on their first appointment, however, as Izumi is manipulated first into nude photos and then into a pornographic video shoot. But once past the initial embarrassment and shame, Izumi begins to feel a fresh sense of liberation and self-satisfaction. (In one of the film’s best scenes, she stands nude in front of a mirror and admires her own perfect body, repeating her grocery-store pitch of “would you like to try some?” with increasing confidence and excitement; it’s difficult to imagine any other Japanese actress playing this scene as well as Kagurazaka does.) Thus begins her trip down a dark rabbit hole, as her erotic adventures expand to include liaisons outside of the modeling gigs, all deliberately crafted by Sono to resemble the plotline of one of Yukio’s romance novels. In a similarly outlandish but appropriate fashion, her sexual experimentation with other men also brings her closer to her husband.

Izumi’s rediscovery of her womanhood is depicted by Sono in contrast to a wraparound story about a detective, Yoshida (action star Miki Mizuno), investigating a grisly murder and dismemberment case in the love-hotel district of Maruyama-cho. Midway through the film, just as Izumi seems to have hit bottom (she later learns there’s still some way to go), Sono also introduces another main female character, university literature professor Mitsuko Ozawa (the astonishing Makoto Togashi, primarily a stage actress in Japan), who becomes Izumi’s Virgil on her tour of the red-light district, as well as a guide into the darkest recesses of Izumi’s own soul. Meeting Izumi after she’s been subjected to a particularly humiliating sexual escapade in a love hotel with a magician-like stranger, Mitsuko takes Izumi under her wing as a street hooker, an avocation undertaken by Mitsuko in seeming rebellion against her blueblood mother and her constrained but respectable lifestyle. She soon becomes a kind of spiritual mentor to the less experienced woman, teaching Izumi only to have sex for love or for money, and that the act in absence of either is a waste of her fine body and independent spirit.

Izumi and Mitsuko’s stories also begin to converge and Sono plumbs the darkest depths of human sexuality and obsession while subjecting his protagonists to increasing levels of degradation and self-sacrifice. And as he approaches the point at which the murder scene from the beginning will find its relevance, Sono spares none of his characters from the knife, making those charges of misogyny a bit meaningless, or at least incomplete in terms of encompassing Sono’s disgust with humanity in general. The men in the film fare no better than the women, coming off either as monsters or cuckolds, and the female protagonists clearly hold all the power in their relationships, inasmuch as anyone in this world holds any power over their own carnal needs. Everyone is deceptive, preaches Sono, both to themselves and to others, and will manipulate both friends and lovers to satisfy personal desires or whims. Mitsuko’s family background is the most monstrous of all, and a scene where she takes Izumi to visit her mother in their family mansion has a kind of lunatic hilarity that harkens back to earlier Sono films like Strange Circus (05) or Suicide Club (01). Even a seemingly “normal” character like investigating detective Yoshida is painted in ambiguous shades, particularly in the extended Japanese-market version of the film, which runs 32 minutes longer than the international cut released in the U.S.

In this longer version, Yoshida’s character is expanded, and it turns out she lives a life as duplicitous as that of Izumi or Mitsuko. Instead of a generic cop, she is yet another damaged cipher of a woman, conducting a steamy affair with an unidentified, dominant man, in addition to cheating with others. Also expanded is Mitsuko and Izumi’s relationship, including several scenes that show that it wasn’t just Mitsuko’s open-minded views on sexuality that attracted Izumi, but also her intellectual environment (a particular poem takes on extra significance as Izumi’s personal story develops). The ending of the film is also affected by the cuts, and the original version ties Yoshida’s own longing for something more with Izumi’s in a way that’s both poetic and mundane.

At the same time that Sono’s long version of Guilty of Romance was making the rounds on the festival circuit, his subsequent feature—his biggest-budgeted production till then—made a splash at the Venice Film Festival, where its two young leads shared a special award. While Himizu (11) shares some spiritual kinship with Guilty of Romance and other Sono films (dark self-realization, dysfunctional and murderous families, a fascination with literature as an escape from one’s own private hell), it’s also a major turning point for Sono in his career as a filmmaker. Not only is it his only work released to date that wasn’t written as an original story (Sono adapted and expanded a popular manga of the same title by Minoru Furuya), but it shows a hopeful optimism missing from the majority of his other films, even if it came served with generous helpings of bitterness, irony, and sobering realism.

Sono’s screenplay adaptation for Himizu was completed just before the disasters of 3/11 occurred, and he quickly re-wrote the film to incorporate a location shoot in Fukushima prefecture, making the earthquake and tsunami background plot elements within the film. Turnaround on the film was so fast, in fact, that it became the first major movie from Japan to incorporate the events of 3/11 into its story. The setting is simultaneously breathtaking and heartbreaking, and almost unbelievable merely three years later. Fukushima post-3/11 was a wasted landscape of destroyed and abandoned buildings that went on for miles and miles, and in Sono’s hands, it becomes a perfect symbol for his characters’ anguished lives. The stark visuals, in combination with extensive use of Mozart’s Requiem on the soundtrack, creates a mood imbued with power and meaning even before the first dialogue is spoken.

As in Guilty of Romance, a major character begins the film with a narrating inner monologue—in this case, that of Keiko Chazawa (Fumi Nikaido), a middle-school girl who amicably stalks sullen classmate Sumida (Shota Sometani). Sumida and his poor family run a boat rental shack near a depressing lake in which sits a decaying and isolated wooden shack (a fitting metaphor for multiple characters in the film). In school, his mantra is “Ordinary is best!” in opposition to his teacher exhorting students to “Go for it!” in post-disaster Japan. Sumida just wants a normal life, without any ambition beyond middle-class survival; Keiko is fascinated by this and decorates her bedroom with Sumida’s statements, treating him as her own personal hero. Keiko’s own family life, while more comfortable financially, turns out to be at least as dangerous and emotionally disastrous as Sumida’s.

In lieu of his missing family, Sumida lives surrounded by a colorful clan of vagabonds, populated with familiar character actors from Sono’s Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance, and seemingly inspired more by European Theater of the Absurd than the original manga. Despite the encouraging and friendly surrogate family, both Sumida and Keiko live in their own private hells, thrown away by their parents and with little to hope for in the future. Sumida’s undirected anger and his interaction with a yakuza boss who takes a shine to him (Denden, the villain from Cold Fish, here decked out in full gangsta rap regalia) drive the story through criminal escapades and two murder-and-body-disposal scenes, and finally, unbelievably, to one of the most upbeat and sentimental conclusions in Sono’s filmography that nonetheless remains tinged with sadness and a bittersweet feeling of loss. Sono’s immediate follow-up, the original drama The Land of Hope (also shot around Fukushima), sets its story more directly within the post-3/11 landscape, as its characters struggle to deal with radiation and government intervention, yet doesn’t manage nearly as much of the drama or poignancy of the more surreal and fanciful Himizu.

Both Guilty of Romance and Himizu pity their protagonists as they fight against the world in an effort to become more human, and dovetail nicely together as the final entries in an angry and contrarian period of Sono’s filmography. Since these two films, Sono’s work has turned back once again to melodramatic and/or escapist exercises in mixing genres and experimentation. Given his success with the latter and his increasing budgets, it’s uncertain whether his sharp focus on human emotions will ever again be so intense.

A winner of the top prize at this year’s IDFA, Song of the Forest centers on an ideal documentary subject: Louis Sarno, an eloquent and passionate man who has gone to extremes for his beliefs. Drawn to a small village in the Central African Republic after hearing tribal music on the radio, Sarno has largely resided in the Congo since 1985, marrying there and fathering a child. The film hinges on his trip to New York with his son who has never left his small village. FILM COMMENT caught up with the director and world traveler Michael Obert, accompanied by his producer Alex Tondowski, at SXSW.

I read that you have a degree in business administration, and then you transitioned to journalism, and now you’re doing ethnography and filmmaking. Can you talk about how you’ve made those career switches?

Michael Obert: I studied economics, and I was kind of a young shooting star in a management career, and I did that for five years. I had a huge salary, around 10,000 marks, a car, an apartment in Paris, and one day I woke up in the literal meaning of the word. I had the feeling that something was wrong—what I was doing had no intrinsic importance to my life. It took me another two months to kind of get things together in my head, and then I quit. This was in 1993. I took my backpack and I went to South America, and the journey took me two years.

All over?

MO: Yeah, all over. Just really drifting, you know? I worked from time to time, but mainly I spent a lot of time with indigenous tribes.

Why did you choose South America?

MO: I wanted to get away as far as possible, and I knew some Spanish. Also, it sounded dangerous, you know, but feasible in a way. I had met people in Paris from Peru and from Colombia, and I started in Guatemala and then I made my way down south. When I came to Peru, I went down to the Amazon Basin. I followed the whole Amazon from the source down to the end of the river, stayed for eight months in Brazil, learned Portuguese . . . and then I came back through Paraguay, to Bolivia and Peru. Two years after I had started, 23 months I think, I stood in Tierra del Fuego, in the southern tip, and I looked south and it was only water, and I knew my trip was over then. So I came back, and I was very surprised that I had written notes over the whole journey. When they became too heavy, I would just send them home to my mother’s house.

So when I came back, in my childhood room in Germany, there was a pile of notebooks that almost went up to my hip. And that’s when I knew I wanted to become a writer. And I never did anything else anymore. It’s a very literary form of journalism, New Yorker style, long features. And I’ve kept traveling since then. Some of my friends say I’ve been on holiday for over 20 years now. I didn’t have a base for a long time. After two years in South America, I then tried Senegal, I hung out in France again, and now I’ve been in Berlin for 12 years. So, to come back to your question, I really think that my journey made me a writer, and then from being a writer, a storyteller. I’m a passionate collector of stories in forgotten paradises as well in war zones. I went to Somalia, to Afghanistan, to a lot of these areas. I’m a hunter-gatherer, gathering stories.

How did you meet Louis Sarno, and how did this become a movie?

MO: In autumn 2009, I was in the Congolese rain forest working on an assignment for a German print magazine. I heard about this white man who was said to be living in the deepest rain forest with a tribe of hunter-gatherers, the pygmies. I said, man, a white American in the rain forest, in this archaic society? I have to find him. So I finished the assignment there and then I had another 10 days left. I was guided by two Bayaka—Bayaka is the correct way to refer to the “pygmies,” because “pygmy” is a pejorative—following this elephant trail for an hour or two into the rain forest. Suddenly the forest opens up and there’s this clearing full of beehive huts (huts made out of bent branches covered with leaves, where people just sleep on the ground). And Bayaka start coming from all sides, staring at me, shouting at me with their spears and facial tattoos and sharply filed teeth, and it was very exotic and it was very intense, and shouting, shouting, shouting, and all of a sudden all the noise stops . . .

It was like a scene in a Hollywood movie. The crowd opened up, there’s this little alley, and at the end of the alley there’s this white guy coming out of the underbrush, no shirt, bare feet, a naked Bayaka baby in each arm. He comes through the alley toward me, he gives away the babies to their mothers, and he comes and he stands in front of me, crosses his arms, and he basically says: “What the hell are you doing here? Who are you? What do you want?” I came unannounced, obviously. So, in these types of situations, very often on my journeys, when I’m threatened—for example, somebody pulls a gun—I have this intuition to take their hand. So that’s what I did in this case too: I just grabbed his hand. So I had his hand in my hand, we were standing in the middle of the clearing in the deepest rain forest in the Congo basin with 200 Bayaka staring at us. Total silence: oh my God, what’s going to happen?

And that’s when it clicked, I think, between Louis and me. Something happened in this moment—now four years later, I still don’t know what it was exactly. Still looking for answers. I looked for answers during the whole process of making this film, especially in the editing phase. So he said: “Okay, you come in.” And we sat in his hut and we randomly talked for hours: the Lower East Side in the Eighties, the Ramones, Heidegger, bush meat, God, and what kind of religion would you practice if you were religious, and stuff like that, you know?  And then in the morning, he says: “Let’s go for a hunt. Three or four days, even deeper in the rain forest, you wanna come?” I said: “Louis I don’t have anything with me.” He said: “That’s okay, we don’t have anything either.” So we went for a hunt, three or four days, we slept on the floor next to the fire, ate the same food as the Bayaka ate, what they hunted and collected, bathing in the same rivers, and we had a fantastic time. We came back to the clearing and it was time to say goodbye. I said goodbye, I’m used to saying goodbye as a traveler. 

But then this funny thing happened: he gave me his email address. That was an absurd moment: we’re in the middle of the jungle and he gives me his email address. There’s no electricity. Every other Saturday he would go to this research base to check his emails. That’s how he’s in touch with his mother, his brothers, and people like Jim Jarmusch, who, I would say, he’s even closer to than his brothers. So, he gave me his email address, and then I think about five months later I get this email from Louis Sarno in the Congo basin, just three lines: “Hi Michael, my mother sent me a ticket . . . Arrival JFK such and such time . . . You want to hook up?” So that’s when I decided to come to New York and meet him again. Just for my own purposes, to write a story about him. And that’s when I met him in New York. I stayed for two weeks.

What year was this?

MO: That was in early summer 2010. He took me to his mom’s house, I met his brothers, I met Jim Jarmusch, and the whole dimension of the story unfolded in the U.S. So again, you know, being a writer I came back. I wrote what I consider one of my favorite stories, a fantastic piece for ZEITmagazin, which is the German version of The New York Times Magazine. I took the same photographer with me to write the story, who also accompanied the film shoot afterward. And during the whole time in the U.S., Louis was telling me about Samedi, his son. I didn’t even know that he had a son. I mean, I had seen him, but I didn’t really pay attention in the rain forest. Here you have this guy, he comes back to the U.S., he’s not feeling comfortable anymore, and he constantly sees the world through his son’s eyes, and he tells you about his son. When he was a baby, Samedi was sick and close to death, and Louis promised him: “If you survive, one day I’m going to show you where I came from, I’m going to take you to New York City.”

So Louis, not being comfortable in his old world, his mother, his brother, his friend Jim Jarmusch, his collection of music, the promise to his son… it’s a dream story, you know? And maybe a year later or so I ran into Alex [Tondowski], who I’ve known for a long time. We’re drinking a lot, and all of a sudden Alex says: “Why don’t we do a movie? I know how to produce and you have the stories!” So we were randomly talking about stories that had I done in the last couple of years, brainstorming, and then I mention Louis, and Alex was really blown away. “We have to do a movie!” That’s now 2011. And then six months later we find ourselves in the deepest rain forest, in the Congo, a small team but with 650 kilograms of technical equipment and camping gear and survival stuff, and we shot the movie. Twelve weeks in a row, five weeks in the rain forest, a good week, week-and-a-half journey, and then another four to five weeks in the U.S.

What were there any technical challenges going so far into a climate where there are very heavy rains at any moment and there’s no electricity?

MO: The major technical challenge was the humidity and the light situation. Around midday, it’s still dark. The darkness during the day is very, very powerful, and if it starts to rain, it gets even darker. We took out our second camera, I think the first day, and it ran for two minutes and it shut down. We couldn’t use that camera for the rest of the shoot. This small camera was meant to be the tool to kind of crawl into the dense vegetation, details. So we only had our big camera left, and we shot the whole thing with it. It was super-heavy for Siri [Klug], our camerawoman, but in the end it really paid off. The quality of the image is much better. It was almost like fate: the camera was broken, we couldn’t use it anymore, we had to use the big one, and it really paid off.

Alex Tondowski: I know the camera department and the sound department spent a huge amount of time every night and on weekends drying all the equipment, putting them in these bags with salt to get the humidity out. Microphones are also very susceptible. And sound was always an incredibly important part of the project.

Did you choose the Bayaka music, or did Louis make the selections?

MO: I chose it. I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford last summer to get a sense of what’s available. Louis has recorded over 1,600 hours of Bayaka music, so I went there to hear the instruments, the pearls of the archives. The variety and the whole spectrum of this music is mind-blowing. They’re all inspired by the sounds of the rain forest, a kind of music through imitation of natural sounds. Louis once said: “The ambience is the orchestra, and the Bayaka are playing the solo.” The 16th-century music [in the film] was there from the very beginning. The very first night I slept there, Louis said: “Michael, I have to play something for you.” He just had a little battery-driven CD player with two loudspeakers, and he puts in this CD in the middle of the rain forest: four voices, polyphonic music by William Byrd from the 16th century. I was blown away. So when the idea of the movie came up, this music was the first thing that was there. I was always very, very clear that the whole story is in this music. It’s not in the Bayaka music for me: it’s in the 16th-century music. It was almost analogous to when he heard the Bayaka music on the radio that lured him into the rain forest, and then he played this music for me that lured me into his life.

So having been lured into his life and then having been lured into making a film, it was very clear that this music has to be the beginning. When we came to the editing, I said: “Let’s forget about dramaturgy and let’s go to liturgy. Let’s celebrate this mass.” So we put in the five pieces before we touched a single image. The curia in the beginning (which is also the opening music), it’s the greeting of God, or in our case it’s the greeting of nature. And then we put certain images out of our material that we thought would fit the different moments of the mass. That’s the structure of the whole movie. Almost nobody knows that we are celebrating a mass, but you can feel that there’s something going on in the background of this movie. Maybe you don’t even realize that it has to do with this music, but there is a narrative thread that comes from somewhere else. The movie was directed and edited by this music. It is a story about a man who heard music on the radio, and he followed the music, and he found the music, and he stayed, and he never came back.

Louis is very open, obviously, but were there any parts of his life where he was sort of like “No, we can’t go there”?

MO: You know, I wouldn’t say that Louis is open. I would say he’s—

—he’s forthright.

MO: Yeah, and he’s very selective. I consider it as a privilege that he opened up, and it’s a huge amount of trust that he has in me as a person. I think that we have so many things in common. And then also, if somebody came to me and said “I want to make a film about you,” my first question would be: “What other films have you done before?”  So, in my case, none. That’s a risk. You know, Louis is a character. I love him. I think you can see in the movie that I have a high opinion of him, and a huge amount of respect, and also like a personal, emotional relationship, almost like a father figure / friend.

When it was clear we were going to make the movie, I came back for a month, and I stayed with their community, trying to get rid of the gap, or the remaining parts of the gap between myself and the Bayaka, and just basically blending in. To eat the same thing, to sleep on the ground next to each other, not to have any privileges, that really is something that is highly appreciated by everybody everywhere in the world. And also, that’s the reason why I wanted the team to be part of the community. We didn’t drive into the forest. We slept right where the Bayaka slept, in tents. So, there was no real no-go area in our conversations. Once the trust was there he was pretty open. I wouldn’t say there were any areas that he was hiding.

But there’s a brief scene where these M’Baka, another Congolese tribe, are smoking, and say: “Let’s act really tough for these white guys who are shooting us.”

MO: Yes, the people with the guns. We came back with 90 hours of material total, and I would estimate that about 50 hours were in a language that I did not speak. So we had a translator from the Congo Basin come over, after we had pre-selected eight hours of material. We had selected it visually and by the 100 or 150 words of Yagua [the language of the Bayaka] that I speak myself. I said: “Okay, this is the question I asked, or this is the subject that I inspired, so they’re probably talking about this and that, which looks good, so let’s put it in.” So there were six weeks where I went through every sentence with this translator to bring it from Yagua into French, and then from French into German, my language. And then from German it was re-translated into English subtitles. As a writer-journalist, words are my daily bread, you know. But this is a very old language, and at least half of translating is interpretation, and I really wanted to make sure.

This scene you mentioned blew me away because it fits so well into the subject of “to watch and to be watched.” I thought, wow, this is a moment where I can get the audience on board—everybody understands that “okay, they’re watching us now.” The whole theme of “who is watching who,” this game, that culminates in the last image of the movie when the woman [telling the Bayaka origin story of white people] looks into the audience for almost a minute, and you hear the sounds of the city. The meta level is very clear: she has watched us watching them all the time.

And that’s a direct step into what is the movie all about, apart from Louis’s personal story. Who are we? Where do we belong? Where’s home? How do we blend into the system? What does the system do with us? Can we get out of the system? If so, where could we go? Where on earth can we still go to live another life? Is this a utopian idea of going somewhere else and become a new person, is it possible? Et cetera. And that all kind of goes with: who am I, what is my own [sense of self], and what is the Other. So you are clearly advised in a very humorous way to acknowledge that you are being watched during the movie. People laugh all the time, but there’s something else coming around with this funny moment.

It’s a succinct reminder that anytime you see a photograph or moving image, someone put a camera there and then made a choice to record.

MO: It’s also a demystification of the idea that the filmmaker is there but also invisible. It’s a complete deconstructive moment of, we are part of this, and it just happens.

Has Louis seen the film, and do you have any plans to show it to the Bayaka?

MO: I have promised Louis and the Bayaka that I would come back and show them the movie. And I keep my promises. We are still working on it. Financing is an issue. It is a major logistical challenge to get a couple of generators and loudspeakers and a screen and a beamer in this humidity. And then there's the current political situation in the Central African Republic, where you have a civil war that recently erupted and over a million people on the run. But we’re working on it. We have invited Louis various times—to the world premiere in Amsterdam, and also here—but he just doesn’t want to leave his community in this difficult time.

Do you see this film as having an activist purpose? You’ve done some activist work in the past with refugees from the Sinai in Israel, and towards the end Louis is talking about how the WWF is not really doing what they should be doing, and the idea of how people who come with good intentions should be careful.

MO: I mean, yeah, this is four years of my life. I’m still a traveler first, and then I’m a journalist or a filmmaker, but that means as a traveler, I’m a human being among human beings. I’m not a journalist among subjects and objects. That’s very clear. Somebody’s dying here, so my first intention is how can I help this guy, and not how can I make a good photo of him. Here is this community, here’s Louis, I feel close to him, I feel close to the people. They’re struggling for survival, and here’s the movie. We have audiences, we have access to the public, so why not use this as a—I wouldn’t call it a tool, but as a messenger for these people exist. We created the Bayaka Project—out of our own knowledge and expertise of what’s going on, we know who does good work there. At the moment, WWF has certain projects to help the Bayaka. Mainly motivated by the filmmaking, basically, because over 20 years nothing really happened, the conservations focused on other things: tropical birds, elephants, gorillas—

—cute, easily marketed animals?

MO: Yes. But now there’s stuff coming up, and they invite us to their meetings so we know what’s going on. We can contribute and say, okay, I think this should be done also. So, the Bayaka Project selects meaningful projects on site and recommends them to our audience to support them. Especially for American audiences, we are here with Global Voices, an NGO that supports Louis directly. Because he’s the only one who cares on site: he buys medicine for tuberculosis, he sends people to hospital, and he doesn’t have a cent. He has no personal belongings, no income, but he pays for all these people.

AT: Plus 50 percent of the proceeds from the film that comes to the production company will go directly back into supporting the Bayakas.

In a world where energy has run dry, in a country where the government robs its citizens of hope with drugs and pornography, in a land where freedom is a four letter word, there is one hero who knows what he needs to spark the revolution: your poo. A vertiginous slide down a swirling toilet bowl of bad taste, Aachi & Ssipak (06) is a deliriously detailed X-rated animated sci-fi epic eight years in the making that has repulsed movie critics and delighted audiences at film festivals around the world. 

Aachi & Ssipak

“Exceedingly grotesque . . . increasingly nasty,” says Richard Kuipers of Variety! “Even mature and physically fit viewers for whom etiquette and courtesy are important values need to think twice before seeing the movie,” says the daily Chosun Ilbo in Korea. And The Korean Times observes with some trepidation: “Human feces are important in the story…”

Not since the anti-authoritarian head trips of Ralph Bakshi has a movie done so much so quickly: within the first reel it’s dispensed more ultraviolence than a thousand action films, annihilated the boundaries of good taste, and violated the copyright on so many precious corporate properties so gleefully that they might never recover.

If Michael Bay and John Waters were forced to make a baby, it would grow up to direct Aachi & Ssipak—a title that pairs the Korean word for “butt” and a Korean profanity. In the story’s vision of the future, feces is the source of power and the government has implanted ID chips in the anuses of its citizens that rewards them with an addictive, hallucinogenic laxative called a “juicy bar” every time they have a “sincere” bowel movement. Aachi, who looks like Little Orphan Annie after 10 years of crystal meth addiction, and Ssipak, a romantic, hairless gumby, team up with a porn star named Beauty whose mutant butt earns her dozens of juicy bars whenever she drops a load. But the Diaper Gang—constipated killer Smurfs with AK-47s who are addicted to laxatives—and a death-dealing government cyborg want to wipe them out before they can live large. 

Mega-action scenes so hyper-detailed they take your breath away unfold in this flick, which might feature some of the best action filmmaking ever to grace an animated movie. Other films are parodied nonstop, and even the movie itself blacks out from bad taste every 10 minutes, returning to consciousness with another scene already in progress. It all ends with a mushroom cloud, a tidal wave of shit, one character’s cheerful promise to drain another’s bowels dry, and a mad scientist making a killer sex doll out of cadavers. 

Aachi & Ssipak is also cursed. Originally slated for a 2002 release, the production stalled until 2006 after its investors pulled out. Then MTV optioned it for a series, keeping the original movie off the American market, before losing interest and abandoning the project. Last week, hope seemed to be in sight when Mondo Media and Cinedigm released a Blu-ray and DVD of Aachi & Ssipak in the U.S. But no. Although the movie looks better than ever, Mondo Media cut four minutes from the film and replaced the entire soundtrack. The original music has been replaced with what sounds like the dubstep setting on a Casio keyboard, made worse by the fact that while the original film’s action scenes were punctuated with sudden silences, here the electro-score is slathered from one end of the movie to the other with little regard for the intentions of the original filmmakers. The voice acting has been dubbed into English, and while the two leads are perfectly fine, the rest of it has been haphazardly directed, with additional dialogue dubbed over formerly silent shots. Without an option to listen to the original soundtrack, or to hear the original Korean-language track with English subtitles, Mondo Media’s disc is a big pile of fail, which is too bad because you get the feeling that their hearts were in the right place.

What makes it even worse is that Aachi & Ssipak is such singular movie. Given the massive costs associated with animation, it’s kind of incredible that this film even exists, and one like it won’t come this way again anytime soon. Director Jo Beom-jin and animation director Gap Kim spent the late Nineties working with two other artists to turn Jo’s Aachi & Ssipak screenplay into a movie, generating concept sketches and rough character designs. 

“We started to make test scenes and pilot films even before the script got completed,” Gap Kim told FILM COMMENT. “The project started as Flash animation but we realized that at the time this technology had too many limits, so we eventually switched to a 2-D and 3-D composite as the script progressed.”

They began to bring more staff on board in the early 2000s, recruiting from Chung-ang University, television stations, anywhere they could find artists who wanted to make more ambitious animation. Taking over a two-story building in the Gangnam District in Seoul, 20 members of the production team moved in. Officially, this was their offices, but as Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, the movie’s character designer and one of the only women on the crew said: “We would only go home every couple of days, and the days and nights just slipped by. We had no other life outside. We lived and worked together all the time.”

Aachi & Ssipak developed a uniquely Korean design sensibility. 

“I was fed up with the Japanese style of animation,” Lee-Lodge remembers. “I wanted something that was a hybrid. Not just American or Japanese or European style, but something in between. We went all the way back to looking at how we constructed basic shapes like circles, triangles, squares, and how slight juxtapositions, or ratio changes, made the impression of the shape’s significance change.” 

They took their influences from everywhere. “We were pulling all-nighters to make things more awesome,” Lee-Lodge continues. “Watching other animation, watching movies from classic to cult from around the world and discussing them. Looking back, it was a bit too much of a mix-up between work and life, but we were all so dedicated under the belief that we were making something cool. I studied antique toys, anime characters, American comic characters, independent film animation characters, toy books, Hong Kong action figures, antique American toys. It was a breakthrough in my character design. I remember we had stacks and stacks of magazines, mixing and matching.” 

Out of all this came not just a distinctly Korean look but some deviously clever conceits. One of the movie’s greatest inventions is the Diaper Gang, a horde of adorable blue creatures who are insanely cute but rabidly violent, and prone to meeting gruesome ends, often with their brains blown out as they cower and sob, begging for their lives in high squeaky voices. Director Jo had noticed that John Woo’s Hong Kong movies contained a steady stream of extras being murdered. The entire production team found it hilarious that these people were seemingly born to run out screaming, wave a gun, and get shot. What if these faceless victims were cute cartoon characters, they wondered? What if they begged for their lives? Thus was born the Diaper Gang, characters who play havoc with audience sympathies while offering a critique of action cinema, and being unbearably cute.

Officially budgeted at 35 billion won (about $3.2 million), the movie was actually pulled off for less than 30 billion won. After a few years of intense work, the rough Flash animation was ready to go, the concepts were sketched, Jiyoun had written the bible for the production, and some scenes were animated. Next, they were supposed to swing into full production in early 2002. But then Buddhism happened. Or, rather, the world’s biggest Buddhist video-game action movie happened, tanked, and took down the production company.

“The production should have begun immediately,” Gap Kim remembers, “but our investor suffered great losses over the film Resurrection of the Little Match Girl which triggered a chain reaction that halted all productions that followed including Aachi & Ssipak. Furthermore, our sponsor company was merged into another, bigger company. Production halted for a year.”

The entire team disbanded. “Everyone wished and hoped that it would work,” Lee-Lodge says. “But there was nothing much we could do except say, ‘Let’s keep in touch.’” Then, in 2004, a new round of funding materialized and production started again. But when the long-awaited Aachi & Ssipak was finally released, it bombed, pulling in an audience of 20,000 people, not even enough to break even. 

In 2006, a small screening was organized in Los Angeles by friends of the production, and the movie picked up steam again. That was when MTV came on board, but when they abandoned the idea, Aachi & Ssipak was dead again. This time, for good. 

It seems cosmically unfair that one of the most unique animated films ever made, a labor of love that beat the odds and reached completion, should be so neglected. But the Aachi & Ssipak experience has always been bittersweet.

“I had more disappointment than satisfaction [with Aachi & Ssipak] for only showing about 60 percent of my ability,” Gap Kim said. “I was involved in the script writing process and did over 50 percent of the storyboards and did the entire layout. Also, I tried to handle as much key animation as possible but only worked on about 50 scenes due to the schedule. It was my first experience on a feature film as an animation director but what made it even more difficult was that I also had to storyboard, direct, do layout, key animation, and art directing all at once. I learned a lot about animation development and production from this experience.”

“I was proud,” Lee-Lodge said. “Those teammates were a great, unique crowd. There were very talented animation directors like Gap and Choong-bok, animators like Seong-gu, and many more. We were friends and family in a sort of nonsense manner.”

Mad Monkey

The next project for Gap Kim was Mad Monkey, part of which can be seen here. A fantasy film about six supernaturally endowed martial artists, it was going to be a 70- to 90-minute film but only about 20 minutes currently exist and, in Gap Kim’s words, “it needs more investment.” 

As for director Jo, he said he didn’t want to talk about Aachi & Ssipak anymore, and declined to comment for this story. “It was a long time ago,” he says. 

And so, Aachi & Ssipak may rest in peace, but we’ll always have the Diaper Gang.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... All the art-house directors keep making kung fu movies. Chen Kaige’s The Monk, is now shooting in China, starring Wang Baoqiang (the smiley, unlucky kid from Dante Lam’s Fire of Conscience). The adaptation of a martial-arts novel by Xu Haofeng—author of Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster and writer-director of The Sword Identity and Judge Archer—is co-produced by Columbia Pictures.

... Hou Hsiao-hsien has finally wrapped his own wu xia movie, The Assassin, after shooting for close to two years. Starring Shu Qi, it’s aiming to premiere at Cannes 2014.

... Indonesian director Joko Anwar recently shot a short film The New Found for Toshiba. It’s not what you’d expect from this master of the macabre, but it’s just as eye-popping and off-kilter as his horror movies. 

... Longtime Hong Kong writer-director-producer, Gordon Chan (Fight Back to School, The Final Option, Painted Skin), has been named head of Hong Kong Hong film studio, Media Asia. 

... In Hollywood, comic-book movies are all about guys in rubber suits crying and punching each other in the face. Want to know what a comic-book movie looks like in Korea?

... French street artist Invader had his cartoony, iconic art up on city walls all over Hong Kong for over a decade—until the Highway Department started tearing it all down recently.

... The super-cartoony J-pop star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu just ended her U.S. tour with a New York City concert that sold out in short order.

... The Great Passage, a film about a dictionary editor, took six of the top prizes at the recent Japanese Academy Awards. It’s even more startling when you realize it’s directed by Yuya Ishii, formerly the bad boy of Japanese cinema who directed impenetrable art-films like Bare-Assed Japan and Of Monster Mode. 

... A similar suprise took place at the Thailand National Film Awards when bigger-budgeted movies were shut out by Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy, a low-budget teen film (developed at the Venice Biennale College) based on 410 tweets from a boarding-school student. The movie took Best  Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editor, and Best Cinematography. Read a review, check out the trailer, and understand why.

In an era of censorship and austerity during the communist occupation of Czechoslovakia after WWII, its New Wave emerged as a vehicle for political rebellion and aesthetic expression that would make waves within both the nation’s film consciousness and the international art cinema. Věra Chytilová was an integral player, and the only prominent woman, in the coterie of Czech filmmakers who during the Sixties created films that defied the conventions of classical cinema and challenged the oppressive political-cultural regime.

Something Different

Chytilová was born in the Moravian town of Ostrava in 1929. She would eventually leave her hometown and strict Catholic upbringing (critical religious themes would appear later in her films) to work as a model and then a clapper girl for the Barrandov Film Studios in Prague, before studying film production at FAMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). Other notable FAMU graduates, and friends and collaborators of Chytilová’s, included Jiři Menzel, Ivan Passer, Miloš Forman, and Jan Nemec—all of whom would come to define this period of the Czechoslovak New Wave with films such as Closely Watched Trains (1966), The Firemen’s Ball (1967), and The Joke (1969), which focused on the surrealism and black comedy of life and national identity under Communism.

Though Forman’s name is often the most remembered, it is Chytilová whose work stands out as the most radical, experimental, iconoclastic, and overtly feminist among her peers (not just of this new wave but perhaps of any European new wave). Her early works The Ceiling (1962), Bag of Fleas (1962), and Something Different (1963), which focus on the issues of the fashion industry, women’s education, and domesticity respectively, established Chytilová as not only an artistic force to be reckoned with, but as a female director unconcerned with assimilating with her male counterparts. Rather, Chytilová devoted herself with revolutionary fervor to breaking the conventions of female representation on screen.

Daisies

Daisies (1966) is her most famous and most experimental film to upset the political, artistic, and gender-bound conventions of the time. The simplest description of the film (and there is no simple description) is that it is about two female friends who, utterly bored with everything, decide to wreak havoc upon the men they encounter and upon consumer society in general. Her existential fever dream of a film makes Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers look like a stroll in the park, as the girls fall into surrealistic vignettes that take the form of a farcical morality tale (the Czech title for the film is Sedmikrásky, which can also translate to “seven beauties”—a play on the seven mortal sins).

The film is rife with narrative and formal ruptures, as well as expressive uses of color and biblical imagery, resulting in a visual magnum opus that is as effortlessly humorous as it is cuttingly critical of Czech society and the prescriptive roles assigned to women. It is a manifesto of Third Wave feminism before such a thing even existed. Daisies also marks a significant collaboration between Chytilová and her husband, Jaroslav Kučera, the cinematographer of the film, and friend Ester Krumbachová, the head screenwriter and production designer (with whom she would collaborate on 1969’s Fruit of Paradise, a retelling of the Adam and Eve tale).

Tainted Horseplay

Chytilová went on to make many films after the end of the 1968 Prague Spring, when Soviet communists enforced even stricter laws of censorship, and many of her male counterparts fled the country. Accordingly, her later works never gained the same level of distribution and recognition as her earlier films, though she continued to push the envelope with critiques of life as lived under communism (Prefab Story, 79) and one of the first movies to depict AIDS (Tainted Horseplay, 89).

Throughout her career, Chytilová proved herself to be a stylistically iconoclastic and absolutely essential artist to the formation of the Czechoslovak New Wave—a cinematic movement with more at stake than the bourgeoisie-obsessed French New Wave in terms of depicting national identity on screen and the sociopolitical implications of revolutionary art. With her death, the Czech and international film community loses a visionary artist and activist, as well as a trailblazing example for female directors across the globe.

A chador-clad vampire on a skateboard, the heroine of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as quietly defiant as the film’s title. Preying primarily on menacing misogynists, our protagonist (Sheila Vand) silently slinks through the shadowy streets of “Bad City,” a fictional Iranian ghost town, maintaining her own code of moral justice deep into the hours of darkness. But when she meets Arash (Arash Marandi), a down-and-out hipster who never seems to have a bad hair day, she finds her thirst for blood quenched by his companionship.

For a premise that might seem to guarantee all cult and no substance, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is one of the most intangibly entertaining art films to come along in a while. Part graphic novel, part Western, part David Lynch, with some film noir thrown in for good measure, it brings together a plethora of visual references to create something that’s much greater than the sum of its parts—and its parts, for the record, are indelibly memorable. Shot in sumptuous black and white, the film is as sweet as it is somber, as visually stylish as it is thematically weighty. Anything but just another vampire movie, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, establishes Amirpour as a spellbinding storyteller.

FILM COMMENT caught up with the English-born, Iranian-American writer-director to talk about her movie, which opens New Directors/New Films tonight at MoMA, and why filmmaking is like dancing naked.

The vampire genre has been explored in film time and time again, but your movie feels entirely fresh. Can you talk about the conception of the project and your relationship with the genre?

I don’t remember a time not loving vampires. I grew up reading Anne Rice. I think they’re one of the most interesting mythical characters out there. I put on a chador one day, which was a prop from another film, and I felt like a bat. That was the first time I thought of the idea for that character. Plus, there’s nothing sexier than a vampire. If a vampire showed up, I’d be like: “Do it: I want to live forever.” That’s my feeling about vampires.

You’ve created a graphic novel in conjunction with the film, and the image of the chador-clad vampire superhero—on a skateboard, no less—works as well on paper as she does on screen. Which came first?

I didn’t write the graphic novel and then decide to make a film out of it, which is the way most people assume it goes. Whenever I write any character for any script, I like to have all of the backstory and history and everything about the character. I was doing that for all of the characters in The Girl [Walks Home Alone at Night] so I had all of these awesome stories, like how she bought the poster of Elvis Presley when she saw him in Morocco, how she became a vampire in Iran, traveled all over Europe… Really cool stuff. Her origin story, how she gets depressed and goes out into the desert to kill herself but can’t do it.

Then sometime around postproduction I was talking about some comic books and graphic novels. More cerebral stuff like Charles Burns and Crumb—I’m not really a Marvel person. So I was like, I’ve got all of these stories, I want to do a comic book, and at that point I thought I’d just do the illustrations myself. And me and one of my producing partners were talking and he was like: “Well, we want to do a comic book,” and then it was like “Well, shit, let’s do it.” We did the first run, and we have two and three coming out next. I think we’re going to do six for the first book. It’s kind of a dream to get to do that. 

Aesthetically, the film references and recalls so many genres and styles but manages to feel completely unique. Did this mark a big stylistic departure from your shorts? I’m especially curious about your decision to shoot in black and white.

I had never done anything in black and white, although I did do a short film of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night which was just a five-minute short, no dialogue. It was just the girl killing one person—this was before I had the idea for the whole film. I thought of a girl in a chador and I thought of the whole character, and it felt very much like a graphic novel, just really surreal and weird. I just saw it in black and white, and I don’t even particularly like black-and-white films. Everything else I’ve done has been color or animation, and the next film I’m doing is color. But this just felt like it had to be black and white. There was never a time when I would have it in color. I think it creates a certain kind of surreal world.

The film is clearly making a comment about gender politics in Iran, but in a way it feels more personal than political. Were you setting out to make something political?

I personally am not setting out to make any comment about anything. She’s just a lonely girl who’s a vampire, and she’s trying to give meaning to what she does, so she tries to look for a moral quotient, like Dexter. It happens to be with guys that are misbehaving in the film, but if you see all of the stories that I wrote, it’s not always men. I don’t want to shut out any idea. I suppose that when you make a film, whether you set out to or not, you’re making observations. So it is some observation that you have about a person or a world or an idea that filters through your brain, and then the person playing the part and all of these people making the film. So I’m sure there are some conscious or subconscious ideas floating in there.

But it’s not Iran, it’s like a fairy tale world, it’s universal. It’s like any town where there’s corruption and there’s secrets and there’s loneliness and people that got dealt a shit hand. They’re searching for something in this loneliness. I mean, that’s what I am and that’s why I made the film. That’s all I really know. I don’t know how everyone else feels.

To me, it felt more personal than political, but the discourse following the premiere has commented otherwise.

It’s so hard for people to resist. But the thing is, I grew up in California. I went to the mall. I’m not on the front lines in Iran. You say “Iran” and it’s like, you can’t pass gas without it being political. If I fart, it’s political. [Laughs]. But I’m so detached from that stuff, but then on the other hand, everything is political. Romeo and Juliet was political, but really it’s just a love story. When you make a film, you will never know the experience of your own film. The making was the experience for me, and now I just want to know what other people think. It’s like dancing naked, you have no idea what you look like. I’m just trying to not be too hyper-conscious of the fact that I’m totally exposed—just trying to be into the music.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack for this film is phenomenal. What your process for incorporating sound?

I just love music, man. Music is everything. The script for my next film, I had the soundtrack done before I finished the script. Music leads the way, and it’s such a big part of a film, it’s like the wind and the sails in a way. I had the music for this film when I was writing the script. Every single song you hear was there when I wrote the script. I knew a lot of those musicians, and the ones I didn’t know, I reached out to and got them on board well before shooting.

I was playing music on set, playing it in the room. Every scene where a song is, it was played. It sets the tone and the pace for everyone involved: the production design, the actors, cinematography, editing. It’s so powerful. It’s the shit! I really trip out that it’s not more common for people to do that when making a film. It’s like building a jet engine. It’s useless if you don’t put gas in it. I love it.

It seems appropriate that Elijah Wood was your producer—I’m thinking of that vampire segment he did with Oliver Assayas in Paris je t’aime. How did you team up with him?

Yeah, that was one of my favorite bits in that. It’s funny you brought that up. The film was already in motion and we were trying to raise money. I had the script and I had the short and had the cast at that point, so it was pretty packaged when he got on board. He saw the short and loved it. He saw it through a very good friend of mine, and they had mentioned something about the film and he said: “That sounds insane, I want to read the script.” So I sent him the script and he read it and he was just about to announce his company he started which was doing art-house, kind of elevated-genre films. This was very much his MO of what he wanted to do.

It’s crazy—I was telling my Mom at that time: “You know, Mom, no matter what they say, Elijah Wood is producing my Iranian vampire Western film.” That right there is what makes America America. No one else can say that. This is a great country where anything can happen if you just shoot for the moon.

The scene where the vampire and Arash go on a date and he pierces her ears is one of my favorite in the film.

I don’t know where this stuff comes from, man. I’m just nuts. I just want someone to pierce my ears at a power plant.

Don’t we all?

[Laughs] Yeah, in one manifestation or another, it’s like: “Mark me, brand me, show me the way, make me right.” There’s something so sweet too about her wanting him to make her do this thing that’s so normal. It’s a fun date. I love it.

The cat in this film is an exceptional actor. I remember you talking about it at your Q&A at Sundance.

The cat is a gangster! The gangster star in the movie. I was so worried that this was going to be the hardest part. It was Sina’s cat, my producer. Really early on I was auditioning other cats, and he was like, why don’t you give my cat a shot? And I was like, he’s too fat, he’s not right, he’s not good-looking enough. And then I met him and he was really good, so calm, so chill—he behaves like a dog almost. And then we did some tests and I thought, OK, he’s the cat, but then he was just beyond. In some scenes he would just be like: “No, no, this is what we’re doing.” He was always awesome, always doing something special. He had great ideas. It’s so weird to say that. He’d just be like: “No coverage, no cutting, one shot, let’s just do it like this.”

Good thing you didn’t discriminate based on looks.

Yeah, looks and weight—what a shitty attitude, it’s so L.A.! [Laughs]

Were you expecting the film to be such a success? First at Sundance, and now onto New Directors?

People have been giving it mad love. I just hope a lot of people get to see it. Sundance really got it, and I feel really fortunate. I really want it to be in a movie theater for a few weeks. I shot it in CinemaScope and for people to see it. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be as hell-bent on that and be fine with VOD.

For more information about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, see the New Directors/New Films website.

“There are many things that men should not see or know,” goes the voiceover at the end of Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture. “Should he see them, he would be better off dying. But should any of us see or know them, then he must live to tell of them.” Rithy Panh’s cinema is an exemplary case of the imperative to bear witness. Born in 1964, the Cambodian filmmaker lived through the murderous days of his country’s Khmer Rouge regime; he survived his parents and siblings, who died of starvation and overwork under the regime that forcibly imposed a brutal new society, a would-be revolutionary utopia of agrarianism, on a population torn away from the lives they had known.

The Missing Picture

Panh’s attempts as a filmmaker to come to terms with his country’s recent past include the drama Rice People (94) and several documentaries about the Pol Pot era, such as S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (03) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (12). But The Missing Picture is harder to categorize. Documentary, personal essay, historical reconstruction, film poem, act of therapy—it’s something of all of these. The film is essentially a personal reminiscence of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge era and its depredations, as well as Panh’s attempt to summon up from his memory a modern Cambodian society that was violently destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, and that now seems as lost as Atlantis—the urban environment of Phnom Penh, Panh’s birthplace, before the city was occupied and forcibly evacuated in 1975.

A key representation of that lost past comes in the image on a strip of old film rescued from a decaying, crumbling reel: a traditionally dressed female dancer, sinuously going through what is presumably a modern movie-studio variation on old steps. Seen briefly at the beginning of Panh’s film, the dancer embodies life, pleasure, sexuality, spirituality, artistry, national history, read her as you will—but above all, she moves. Very little else in Panh’s film does. The premise of The Missing Picture is that the horrific past that the film invokes, together with the happier era that preceded it, must be reconstructed out of whatever simple materials are available, because true images of these periods do not exist. The Khmer Rouge destroyed not only modern Cambodian society but its culture and its images of itself, while the regime’s own filmed pictures are mendacious: staged propaganda tableaux of Pol Pot, his inner circle, and his supposedly faithful multitudes, but never true images of the conditions under which Cambodians were forced to live. Instead, to re-create true images of the world he remembers, Rithy Panh fashions clay dolls, seemingly childish squat effigies painted to resemble real or representative people, and arranged in realistic settings. Early on, we see a family gathering or a pop concert on a Phnom Penh street; later, vast grey panoramas of the quarry-like work sites that so much of the country had been transformed into, in the attempt to forcibly establish the People’s Republic of Kampuchea as a “pure” rural society inspired by the back-to-nature ideals of Rousseau.

At first, the hand-painted models—sculpted by Sarith Mang, although the film’s overall design is by Panh himself—look naïve and clumsy, but as the film proceeds, their chunky, handmade quality makes them all the more expressive. At various points in the film, as you see the masses of workers, adults, and children, carrying loads of rice or earth on yokes on their shoulders, across landscapes reduced to calcified lunar surfaces, you are reminded horribly of the Chapman Brothers’ Hell, their depiction of an exaggerated Holocaust scenario populated by tiny plastic models. But the Chapmans were out partly to shock with overstatement, to create a black-comic embodiment of the unthinkable, to be displayed in an art institutional gallery context. Panh’s aim is simpler, and more bitterly direct. The simplicity of the scenarios he creates exposes the truth of the phony simplicity of the Khmer Rouge dream (this new world’s “purity” unveiled as deprivation and void).

At the same time, his method performs an exorcising function, by allowing the truth to be told in very simple terms, yet indirectly. The models serve because reliable photographic evidence is missing—and their makeshift nature reminds us that firsthand evidence is missing, as comprehensively erased as the society that it would have documented. It’s significant that The Missing Picture ends with a scale model of a psychoanalytic session—Panh’s dolls are this film’s equivalent of the toys often used by therapists, which enable children to articulate traumas and abuses that they might otherwise keep silent.

The fact that Panh was a child when he experienced the horrors he recounts—he was 11 when his family were driven out of their Phnom Penh home—means that his use of models is especially to the point. Speaking directly about his past through his film’s toy-like vistas, he presents a child’s experience of horror as a privileged vantage point on the unthinkable. I mean “privileged” only in this sense: it is in adopting the position of a child who endures horrors but fails to understand the reason for them that a film can reach a new position of understanding. Comparisons might be drawn with a somewhat different approach to atrocity, that of the recent documentary about death squads in Indonesia, The Act of Killing. Some commentators felt that it was at once trivializing and abusive—even an act of collusion—on the part of Joshua Oppenheimer and his collaborators to encourage former death-squad members to make fantasy movies re-enacting their crimes. But like Panh’s film, Oppenheimer’s starts with the premise that what cannot easily be addressed directly can perhaps be approached from an angle of play—which may ultimately prove the most serious possible approach.

Panh’s method can at moments seem flippant or precious: it never really works when he digitally incorporates his clay figures into newsreel of old Phnom Penh (the whole point of his figures is that they are motionless, even if his camera is not). The film’s first-person French-language commentary, seemingly voicing Panh’s autobiographical account of the Cambodian ordeal, is in fact written by Christophe Bataille and read by Randal Douc—doubly distancing the text from Rithy Panh as original narrator, yet also thereby enhancing its directness, giving it the detached authority of a poetic statement. Matched with the film’s images—sometimes beautiful, most often all the more harrowing because of the gentleness of the effigy-like figures—the text takes on a savage, bitterly melancholic poetry that recalls the incantatory matter-of-factness of Jean Cayrol’s text for Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. As one line of the voiceover puts it, in reference to the possibility of revolt under crushing oppression: “Sometimes a silence is a scream.” The inexpressiveness of Panh’s dolls could hardly be more expressive, their immobility suggestive of the uncontainable energies of a nation frozen by history. Their silence, of course, is deafeningly, furiously eloquent.