Béla recommends…

Posted on by harrietwarman

Whilst working for Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011, I had the pleasure of meeting Béla Tarr (actually ‘pleasure’ is perhaps too weak – compared to the other film related events in my life last year meeting Tarr was probably the high point). Tarr was at the festival for his own film, the incredible Turin Horse, but he was also there to introduce a selection of films he had chosen as a guest curator. One of the enigmatic directors’ selection was The Round Up (Szegénylegények, 1965) by fellow Hungarian filmmaker, Miklós Jancsó. I watched as Tarr described how highly he regarded Jancsó, and said very simply that his films were wonderful and everyone should see them. This humble introduction was all I was able to see of the screening however as my work held my attention elsewhere. Fortunately Second Run DVD re-released The Round Up in their box set The Miklós Jancsó Collection alongside My Way Home (így jöttem, 1964) and The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967) so Tarr’s recommendation hasn’t withered into to the ether of hundreds of other films that I intend to see and then never get around to…

My verdict, having now seen these three beautiful films is much the same as Tarrs’ – that everyone should see them. There is a lot I could say about Jancsó’s framing of the Hungarian landscape, the despair and portrayal of absent morality – but this might not be adequate enough to persuade you to watch them (but of course I’ll try anyway).

My Way Home follows the misadventures of a teenage Hungarian attempting to escape the oppressive regime of the Russian military. Falling in and out of freedom, our protagonist eventually ends up in the care of another young man tasked with farming dairy for the army in an area of land surrounded by mines. Despite their language barrier, a sense of compassion grows between the two, wrought out of their mutual captivity on the farm. My Way Home introduces Jancsó’s thematic preoccupations whilst presenting a sometime charming portrayal of unlikely friendship.

The Round Up, however offers an entirely bleak perspective on humanity as prisoners of the Austrian occupation in Hungary in the mid-nineteenth century are arbitrarily treated with an almost total lack of dignity. The round up of the title refers to the collection of suspected members of a gang of resistance fighter’s lead by Sándor Rózsa, who are thought to be in the prison. Peeling individuals away from the group – the soldiers promise leniency if a prisoner can name someone who has killed more than they, hoping it will reveal allegiances and eventually the gang itself. Jancsó handles the movement of characters like a slow dance or chess game, each moved here, there, backward and forward around the prison. This drawn out game of sorts establishes the films tension but through lack of a use of close up, denies any emotional investment giving an overall mood of negativity. It is due to the masterful way that Jancsó directs that the film made such an impact in terms of innovation on its first release.The Red and the White is demonstrable most overtly of Jancsó as a political filmmaker. Detailing the fighting between the Hungarian volunteers who supported the ‘Red’ revolutionaries against the ‘White’ counter- revolutionaries, the film displays the wider implications of decisions made by the powerful over the weak, and how unstable and that power can be.

These three films will stay with me; their images are hard to shake – for their tragedy, beauty, even for the occasional moments of humour but mostly for the unique and stunning vision of director Miklós Jancsó.

Jancsós’ theme throughout these first extraordinary films is the fragility of humanity in the face of war, trauma and poverty. With such grand and serious ideas being dealt with – these are not beautiful films in a simple aesthetic way – they are beautifully about the human condition.

We go there to escape, to find ourselves again…

Posted on by harrietwarman

Yesterday I attended a screening of Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning, 2005) at the Edinburgh Filmhouse. Playing in a packed cinema 2, projected on 35mm, the film had the audience sat utterly rapt, caught up in the atmosphere of near silence and awe. It was the kind of cinema experience you hope to have every time you enter the auditorium, but one that is sadly sporadic. I’ve written about this type of unique communal joy in the darkness before on my blog, and I certainly felt it seeing Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2010) at EIFF this summer, but Into Great Silence seems to be congealing somewhat inside me, so I felt the need to ponder over its lingering effect.

The idea of the movie theatre being akin to something religious, reverent is not an original one. Terence Davies talks of the influence of Catholicism in his work, favouring symmetrical framing and use of light that echoes the alter and stained-glass windows, not to mention the use of characters singing perhaps signalling a choir of angels. In his documentary, Of Time and the City (2008) his velvety voiceover speaks of cinema replacing religion in his life; this is certainly an experience I can relate to as well. Do we all need something to fixate on? Do we need something to be completely passionate about? If this is God for some, it may be cinema, and the movie-theatre, for others.

The French social-anthropologist, Edgar Morin wrote in his underappreciated book, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956, 1978) about the movie theatre providing conditions that are conducive to a reverent state. The darkness, reclined seating, presence of strangers, and flickering projector combine to allow the spectator to enter into a different state of mind:

The spectator in a “dark room” is, on the contrary, a passive subject in a pure state… for the spectator, deep in his cell, a monad closed off to everything except the screen, enveloped in the double placenta of an anonymous community and obscurity, when the channels for action are blocked, then the locks to myth, dream, and magic open up.

-P97, UMP.

Of course in the age of 3D and live satellite broadcast, most of the time the spectator cannot be considered to be closed-off, (especially if they’re of the type to check their phone in the cinema). However, I feel Morin’s description is highly applicable to the type of experience I had seeing Into Great Silence. Of course, I can’t ignore the subject of the film as a contributory factor: a near three-hour documentary, with no commentary, observing the almost completely silent day to day lives of the inhabitants of the Grand Prior of the Carthusian Order, a monastery high on the French Alps. Adjusting myself to the pace of the film, the audience and I seemed to slip into a meditative state, colluding with the cyclical rhythm of the film, our mutual appreciation made apparent when the image-switched to slapstick – monks sledging provided a small release of hysteria amongst the ‘congregation’.

Reverence therefore, can still be felt at the cinema. At a screening of his film The First Movie, Mark Cousins declared he felt cinema to be incredibly reverent, and if you’ve seen his The Story of Film: An Odyssey on More4 you will know that his musical voice-over drips of this sentiment in every word.

I wonder if others have had experiences like this in the past decade? In the 1990’s Susan Sontag declared the decay of cinema, but I think that we have now come back to an age of wonderful, exciting films. Even despite the financial restrictions that all artists face, cinema worthy of reverence is still being created, at least that’s what I believe.

We Are Aesthetical

Posted on by harrietwarman
'Joe'

Do you know the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul? Lucky if you do, for his films seem to offer a window into a mystical world at once alike and so strange to the one we usually perceive. If you don’t I would like to take some time to describe what it is you’re missing, and why you should seek him out.

Weerasethakul (or ‘Joe’ as he introduces himself) was born in 1970 in northeast of Thailand. He studied Architecture and Fine Art and started making films and videos in the 1990’s.  Working independently of the Thai studio system, Weerasethakul’s films consistently portray a world that teeters between differing planes of reality or ideas of consciousness, whilst his use of mostly non-professional actors render this otherworldliness completely natural. My own experience of discovering ‘Joe’s’ work came when I went to see his Palme D’or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010). A beguiling experience – I truly felt that in the auditorium that day I entered another reality. Uncle Boonmee was described by critics as a retrospective look at the directors past work – a ‘greatest hits’ of sorts of his most poignant ideas, but nevertheless a claim surprising for a filmmaker so young. After seeing it however, I did indeed decided to go back to the beginning, as it were, and watch Weerasethakul’s previous films to discover how his unique vision became so clear.

Rather than attempt to write about all that I’ve seen however, I’ll simply concentrate on two: Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004). Weerasethakul has described how the inspiration for Blissfully Yours came from witnessing two female illegal immigrants from Burma, being arrested at the zoo. The director wondered what kind of day the women had before the authorities brought their freedom to an end. Similarly, in the film, the character Min is a Burmese immigrant whose uncle, Sirote and his wife Orn are trying to bribe their doctor into giving him a medical certificate so that he can work. Blissfully Yours is a film of two halves – the first concentrating on the interactions these characters have with authorities and the second literally escaping from this as Min takes his Thai girlfriend, Roong to a secluded beauty spot in the jungle. The simplicity of the plot of Blissfully Yours is its strength – though some impatient viewers may find its slow pace tedious, the beauty in the imagery on display demonstrates a writer/director with a fascination for the transformative effect of nature.


The primacy of nature and human response to it is perhaps given true clarity in one scene in particular. Having driven out of town – action marked as the beginning of the second part of the film by the credits sequence appearing on screen; Roong and Min arrive at the edge of a secluded forest. Making their way through the dense jungle, the pair struggle with the heat and uneven ground until Min eventually signals Roon to stop. Telling her to cover her eyes, he leads her slowly out of the undergrowth. Before her is a magnificent panoramic view of the mountains, illuminated gently by the afternoon sun. In any mainstream epic, a scene like this (in Peter Jackson’s King Kong for example) would frame the landscape from Roong’s point of view, allowing the audience to ‘experience’ the spectacle with the character. Weerasethakul instead partially blocks the sky with his actors, and captures Roong’s expression of joy and surprise instead. It is the human reaction to nature that is interesting, and crucial to the directors understanding of life.

Weerasethakul’s understanding is partially influenced by his Buddhism, and the presence of spirits alongside the living is common throughout his films. ‘Joe’ has also continually been compared to Terrence Malick in his use of nature as a central character in his work, or as writer Adrian Martin put it, nature is ‘always beaming, breathing and pulsating at the heart of his oeuvre’ (Sight & Sound December 2010).

Blissfully Yours also demonstrates a Proustian affinity with the details of life. In his introduction to the film accompanying the DVD release, Weerasethakul speaks of developing the characters in his films from the experiences of the actors who play them. Little, seemingly insignificant actions such as the way they eat are all part of the characters search for bliss in a frustrating world. Peace perhaps comes from a combination of discovering the extraordinary and the comfort of the familiar, or preferred way of doing things. Even if as a viewer of Blissfully Yours, this seems to amount to very little so-called plot developing action, I feel that everyone can and should relate to the intention of attempting to slow down for a while and listen to oneself, as the characters do.

Tropical Malady, for its own part, begins in much the same way as the former film: with a naturalistic view of ordinary life. Army men are seen posing with a body they find next to the jungle. One of them, Keng, eats dinner with a family who live nearby. He forms an attachment with one of them, Tong, who works at an ice factory. Their relationship develops into one of tentative, then passionate love, all played out entirely naturally. They attend a pop show, have dinner, and then they visit a shrine inside a cave, signalling the introduction of the mystical to the film. The two-part structure is also adhered to in Tropical Malady. Keng and Tong, after a consummation of their love, of sorts, seem to part, with Tong walking into the darkness along the side of a road. Following this, a short film within the film signals the break between the first and second part of the film; A Spirit’s Path tells the tale of a powerful shaman who entered the jungle and took on the form of a tiger. The second half of the film concerns Keng’s search for the beast, and his eventual union with the spirit that dwells inside it. Weerasethakul draws parallel’s between the unclassifiable connection between human spirits and that of the hunter and hunted; the sounds of the jungle combined with that of radio static uncannily evocative. In one sense a horror story, Tropical Malady is daringly experimental for its use of darkness. Weerasethakul has spoken about how his intentions were to try and film at the lowest possible light levels, perhaps to emphasise that moment when illumination does occur.

What I find so involving about Apichatpong’s films, and concordantly the work of Malick, is that by focusing on nature, there seems to be an attempt to evoke through cinema, the beauty and purity of unmediated experience – which is of course impossible; it is screened from us by the frame of the film-camera and mode of spectatorship that we choose. That is not to say that media is not a presence in Joe’s work – at the end of Uncle Boonmee the characters are seen catching up on their television (and by the way, seeming to simultaneously go out for dinner) whilst in Syndromes and a Century, all the gadgets of contemporary culture are present and correct. It’s simply that more than conveying this basic experience of daily life, Weerasethakul seems to want to go beyond that into a realm that can only be felt, and on the way communicate with wry humour, some of the absurdities of human activity.

There are so many things that I could say about this unique directors work, how his films are connected, and the characters seem to all exist within the same film-world and each narrative somehow linked to the next. His use of absurdist comedy and reflexivity are also strange pleasures to be found. I hope that you seek out these films and I invite you to share your views about Joe, and your feelings about the worlds he creates.

Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady are distributed by Second Run DVD. For links to other distributors of Joe’s films see my blogroll.