Unwrapped
Wherever the months go, a broken blog haunts time. A post or a millstone, epigraph or inauguration—the blog isn’t fussy, so after some unusual May gray in Berkeley (a grey which, when combined with the long spring hours, totals an endless diffusion of light), I answer. The reason for this long absence is plain enough: I have been subsumed in words these last six weeks, working on a couple of term papers for school, and I’ve needed my free time to be elsewhere, in a body rather than at a desk. One of my papers is on Todd Haynes’s [Safe] and the idea of pathological space (with nods to Susan Sontag and Mike Davis), a subject which allowed me to expand upon the “a woman alone” thread I posted a few months back. Female solitude has also overhung many of my choices for the San Francisco International Film Festival, which concludes tomorrow. I haven’t been able to attend enough films to constitute a proper festival roundup, but this seems a logical a way of starting again. Since I haven’t posted any of my links for a while, either, I might as well indicate the short SFIFF preview I wrote for the Guardian, focusing mainly on Avi Mograbi’s troubling Z32 and Jean-Marie Teno’s fertile Sacred Places, in addition to a profile of Martha Colburn I wrote for Cinema Scope.
So my SFIFF is an embarrassingly short list this time around: besides early looks at the Mograbi, Teno and Modern Life, I played my chips for Snow, Oblivion, Summer Hours, 35 Shots of Rum, California Company Town and the new UCLA restoration of A Woman Under the Influence. I missed Irina Leimbacher and Kathy Geritz’s program of experimental shorts, Our Beloved Month of August, Lake Tahoe, Bluebeard, the restored Le Amiche, and a few others “must sees” I’m not remembering at the moment. That lens of female solitude couldn’t help but guide my viewing of Snow, the Cassavetes and California Company Town. The first, a Bosnian film by first-time director Aida Begic, is set in a remote village in 1997. The community is predominately populated by women, the men having been disappeared in the preceding years. Amidst the bitter fruit of killing, the women make jam—lava-like, deep magenta jam. As with many young filmmaking talents, Begic has a clear feeling for physical textures, and I liked the way this rich tactility plays off unspeakable memory, the abundance of harvest against the bitter appointments of loss. It’s too bad then that she loses this elegant balance in hackneyed magical realism and a serviceable “will they sell the farm?” plot.
The touches of magical realism in Heddy Honigmann’s new documentary, Oblivion, work better for being located squarely in the realm of performance: the élan required to transform a busy crosswalk into a stage (for juggling, cartwheels, movement). This was a nice case of synchronicity for me, as the other paper I’m writing is about two of Heddy Honigmann’s earlier documentaries (Metal and Melancholy and The Underground Orchestra). The paper is titled “Passenger Side: Heddy Hongimann’s Aesthetics of Listening,” and in it, I try to map out how Honigmann’s approach to interview (solidly in the participatory style, with interviews always framed as encounters) relates to the musical ways she then stitches them together: two sides of the listening enterprise, ethics and poetics. There are a few exchanges in Oblivion which stand as classics in her canon, and if anything Honigmann now seems even freer interweaving melodies of gesture and testimony, memento and memory. The act of remembrance: it’s everywhere, in the indelible interviews themselves, but also in the way the film seems to listen to itself—there is, for instance, the way the afterimage of the prologue’s immaculate presentation of a fancy cocktail mingles with a frog-enhanced smoothie served from a garage (it’s thought to help the memory). Honigmann’s documentaries continue to give me the vertigo I associate with cinema of an especially high order.
As I pull up to those films already well-trodden by critics, it seems I’ve already run on too long. So, double-time for the rest. I’m writing a review of Summer Hours for the Guardian, soon to be linked, but for now I’ll say that while not amongst Assayas’ best—I prefer Les Destinées Sentimentales for the writer-director’s Proustian mode—it certainly wasn’t without its pleasure, chiefly in the drama of natural light and two sprightly bookending scenes of youthful oblivion which, taken with the oh-so French countryside, reminded of Varda’s Le Bonheur. Far more attuned to the circadian rhythms of family relations and the elliptical structures of dwelling was Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, a remarkable film of patience and detail. The objects which reverberate through the film here (a rice cooker, for instance) are not marked with the same Musee d’Orsay pedigree as Summer Hours’ beautiful things, but they yield a richer field transience for not being so busily fussed over. Along similar lines, one could write a comparative essay on the way the two films configure relationships with meals. Rum has the usual great stuff from cinematographer Agnès Godard, including several shots to add to the already rich pantheon of train cinema.
(Below, trains as seen by cinema in 1895 and 2007 — for a full day’s worth of majestic locophilia see the four visual essays here, here, here and here)
Another is in California Company Town, though I feel I would be giving too much away by describing it here (strange to say for a landscape film, but there it is). I plan on writing about this film at length in the future, so for now I’ll just say I find it admirable and surprising. The structure seems like simplicity itself—we cut from the ruins one California company town to the next (roughly in chronological order of the industries represented), guided by filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt’s wavering experience of place (durational landscape cinema clearly inspired by James Benning, but exhibiting an eye for composition and comment all her own) and research (her essayistic voice-over). There is no map, except for a well-honed wilderness of field recordings and radio signals. And yet despite this minimalist structure—one gentleman at the screening I went to asked Schmitt, “Why did you make a motion picture?,” a question she answered beautifully—there is much to discuss here: in the idea of telling history through space;of a personal archive; of amnesia and the view from the road; on privatization’s privileges and erasures; on forgotten utopias, going back to the future; in finding a cinematic median for research and reflection; in land as palimpsest, something which has been written; and yes, on solitude of female origin. Much more to come.
And so the festival ends, but the regulars in town are keeping things interesting. kino21 is hosting a screening of Daniel Barnett’s White Heart tomorrow at ATA. The same folks screened Bruce Baillie’s Quick Billy and Roslyn Romance—two films which so turned inside out my idea of cinematic form that I’ve been scared to think of them too much since—on the same night the 50th installment of the San Francisco Film Festival opened in 2007; there was a mischievous pleasure in attending one of the highlights of the year in San Francisco filmgoing at ATA, while just blocks from where the suits and partygoers politely sipped The Golden Door (I’m sure it was great). Always being one for bookends, I’ll be there tomorrow night. Also on the horizon, the PFA seems to have read my mind by programming a short Phil Karlson retrospective. I’ve been intrigued since seeing 99 River Street a couple of years back—file along with Act of Violence under FSWHM: Films Scorsese Wishes He Made. A few other things besides, but now that Text of Light is flickering again, they deserve their own turn.
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