Inaguration of the Berry

There is a new Calgary under Calgary. I inaugurate Cowberry, city of cinematographs hungry to: play; morphologize; hatch hybrids; engage youngsters; bring y’all closer to me and each other; embed – deeply. The new Calgary International Filmflam Festival is upon us (Sept. 19) and that is reason enough to start cine-dancing; cine-poeming; what have you. If you make this blog lonely you shall be lonely, also. If you fail to water it with wisodoms, yr house plants shall surely die.

I will begin with some thoughts on my favorite films of last year, but, before that (and this should suggest and unspoken imperative for how things are done here) an epigram from the man who has set the bar for all cinematographic searching: Robert Bresson – in his epigrammatic Notes on Cinematography – the man what trumped Cézanne to become the greatest poet of all time (neither of them having written a poem with words on paper, having outmoded their respective quills): “Images. Like modulations in music.”

So, again, I begin with thoughts on a year passed by some time back. You will be reading my festival reports and capsule itterations here, friends, in the future. Otherwise the loss is not mine. The loss bleeds right here, in and of itself. And who likes a stain?

2007:

1. Inland Empire
Lynch, in his inestimable, sui generis style, has come dangerously close to finding a new form with this video extrapolation of his late-period fugue technique. Though just another Möbius strip, it is certainly his greatest achievement, formal or aesthetic, after Eraserhead first emerged from the AFI horse stables. Inland Empire (apparently occasioning experiences of real life synaesthesia in some viewers) was well served by being distributed in the Roger Corman / Barnum & Bailey style, causing it to resemble a (post-global) nightmare slowly sneaking down into our towns from upstairs. Lynch certainly gets my apocalyptician of the year award notwithstanding fierce competition from the likes of Richard Kelly. An absolute triumph of form in the William H. Gass sense of the word; a thing synthesized by proxy through the most systematic yet precarious set of disciplines, like a monstrous, Rabelaisian house of cards being built along with its own corresponding physics.

2. Hayabusa / Dog Days Dream
This little seen Japanese comedy has the absolute mark of a real master and was surely my happiest cinematic lark of the suddenly robust-seeming Calgary International Film Festival. Director Ichii Masahide has made a film about capitalism, youth, and ennui, but his long takes and stance of wry anarchic glee align him more with Tati, Keaton, the three principle brothers Marx, and even – when things get a little misanthropic after the air conditioning gets cut off – W.C. Fields in all his grand glandular wreckage, then they do an Antonioni, say, or a Jancsó. A hopeful and uplifting post-punk suite, then, about giving up the ghost of giving a fuck but never going gentle into that Shinjuku night. It’s still post-’68 and it never won’t be, the film reminds us, yet there is still the hope of good company and the wilder they are, the less they have to lose: well, all the better.

3. … a bude hur / It’s Gonna Get Worse
Speaking of ’68! we don’t often enough hear that year invoked in these Empire of the West days in reference to the famous Czech Spring of Socialism that came to its abrupt end, with its dead dissidents and Soviet tanks brandished by Czech hippies with swastikas as seen (and examined) in Jan Nemec’s live-on-location, documentary-by-accident Oratorio for Prague. Having done my thesis on the August of both Prague and Chicago (think former SDS organizer Todd Gitlin’s maxim “Welcome to Czechago”) this is my old bag, and so thus it was that I greeted Petr Nikolaev’s answer to Phillippe Garrel’s recent ’68 masterpiece, Les amants réguliers, with Dickensian expectations. This is one of those rare, non-Heideggerean situations where the desire was pretty much met by exactly what it desired and was thusly sated, against all odds suggesting the inevitability of the contrary coming to pass in the unrelenting present-of-hand of frustrated consummation. DOP Divis Merek sets up docureal b&w shots of historically weighted urban locales with an attention to light and frame that very much evokes both Raoul Coutard and William Lubtchsansky, at the same time reminding me of the marginal, striated and smooth Deleuzean zones that Robbie Müller covers at various speeds in early Wenders. Also, the film shares Garrel’s anguished tone in performing its heartfelt paean, never ceasing to maintain a piercing (self) critical rapier in regards to its countercultural bloodletting. Such films are tremendously important because they presence a tremendous, tremulous absence without enshrining the eroticized youngsters in the sick way the news crews did and which was parodied in the practices of radical groups like SLON and Medvedkine or fragmented beyond recognition, reduced to some coarse Barthean grain by the final sections of Debord’s film version of Society of the Spectacle or Tom Palazzolo’s shorter Chicago equivalents, Campaign and Love It, Leave It.


4. Stellet licht / Silent Light
A literally stunning film (although somewhat fitfully so if viewed in the company of Londoners at the Prince Charles Cinema, who have a tendency to alternatively wretch and snigger at all the “ugly geasers snogging” – these are clearly not a people familiar with the director’s previous two films), Silent Light also invokes another word: revelation (not just as in The Book of …, but that too). Garnering comparisons from usually restrained critics to late Tarkovsky and paying self-conscious homage to Dreyer’s transcendental Ordet, Reygadas has presented himself as one of the great young upholders of the cinematographic tradition and the very question of the necessity (or, indeed, the very seat of power) of the cinema. A master of audiovisual tone and tempo resembling Bruno Dumont, but better here than the French iconoclast has ever quite been, he also shares an incredible ability, also demonstrated by Lucile Hadzihalilovic in her remarkable Innocence (‘04), to preserve the naturalism of non-actor children while directing them through complex blocking and exacting wide-angle lensed frames. Finally there is the extraordinary poetic undressing of the most minor of North American microcommunities demonstrated in the greatest works of Jon Jost, the unheralded master of this stuff. Silent Light is the cinephile’s favorite type of triumph: one hoped for from the artist, but all the same utterly unforeseen.

5. Sanxia haoren / Still Life
In a year of incredible cinematography Jia and lenser Nelson Yu Lik-wai’s latest, projected majestically at the BFI, was the cock of the walk as far as this humble agitator is concerned (although clearly Roger Deakins should be getting himself a golden Marxo-Freudean butt plug from the Motion Picture A-sham-emy this February). No film I can think of has been this powerful in terms of its investment in the sociohistorical and material weight – the very élan vital – of a particular landscape since Kiarostami capped his great trilogy with Through the Olive Trees. The sense of alien intervention and digital play lends the film a new lightness not seen (or not quite seen) in the ealier films, still it remains as profound and earnest an anatomization of its national psyche. Another millennial masterwork from the World crew.


6. Shi gan / Time
For anyone not aware of the critical muckraking that has been going on for a year or two now it is helpful to know that director Kim Ki-duk is a much argued about filmmaker. Many such as Asian cinema go-to-guy Tony Raynes think that he is a hack who shoots around wildly for cheesoid symbolism like a man who has lost control of his automatic weapon. He has also been called a misogynist. Though I couldn’t tell from his Samaritan Girl if his view of women was shallow or possibly troublingly stupid and adolescent (I was pretty sure that it was though … would have even said puerile), I sure could tell that the filmmaking was scattershot and uniformly awful in its stylized Radio Head pouting and teenage cutter attention drawing tactics. However, festivals eat his films up like rock candy (or, I suppose, crack cocaine serves as well) and audiences around the world (excluding Korea where he is a pariah, it seems) appear to dig. And since he tends to take things to shocking places I really wanted to check the film out. Consider my opinion re-fucking-considered, Kim fans. I now see why those who love him compare him to Fassbinder. Here he really hits that razor’s edge balance with outlandish characters who behave oafishly horrible to one another but still rip out our fucking heartstrings with beauty, vulnerability, frustrated longing. This is also an important sociocultural statement about the plastic surgery epidemic amongst young women in Korea, the North and South divide, and the divide of this generation from its history, possessed of new virtual malleability, lost in a morphic database like the Japanese kids of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Bright Future. A much needed update of Frankenheimer’s Seconds and Teshigahara’s The Face of Another for the Botox generation and a zillion times more profound than the admittedly quite winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

7. Death Proof
Running on all cylinders, Tarantino’s royal flush has no kings in it whatsoever. What’s cousin Quint cribbing from this time? The list, as usual, is longer than a Fritz Lang anaconda, but rest assured that the ladies rule to coop (the coup?) and you’ll catch up with his childhood love of Dukes of Hazard … and for once you will be able to congratulate him on an unmitigated masterpiece of subversive fun (seriously one of the most charming movies this truly drunk-on-the-stuff client has ever had pored up his craw). Just the newly restored lap dance scene alone references Blue Velvet, Almodovar and his protégé de la Iglesia, his buddy Rodriguez – and he’s paying so many props to seemingly unrelated contemporary Richard Linklatter in the Austin section … or what about all the references to the films of Jack Hill merged with Smokey and the Bandit? Opening with Jack Nietsche and the foot/ass fetish is the least of it (though it sure demonstrates that you are in good, derelict hands). This movie is a total feminist, fetish masterpiece (like a copy of Italian Vogue) and if you don’t notice that the first time then I recommend that you rescreen Death Poon and watch Zoe Bell return the too-cool-for-Burt-Reynolds Pierrot gazzze right as power polarities are putting our portrait-of-a-serial-killer not-so-cartoony-as-we-might-at-first-think antagonist right in the goddamn crux of his own swarthy castratedness, poring Red Rose bourbon on his wounds and weeping … then she grabs a heavy pipe and leaps on a Dodge Challenger like it were a John Ford stallion. The editing is the most brilliant freaked out cyberkink madness since Miike’s first Dead or Alive. I would marry any one of up these bitches AND FAST. And good to see Film Comment on the rack at a Tennessee gulp ‘n’ go! Plus Tarantino’s best soundtrack yet! His most Godardian/Brechtian/Warholian film! The spare parts of the 70s are at work here to be sure, but I swear I can smell the spirit of the protorevolutionary, pisstaking 60s burning in the gas tank. It put a tiger in mine, at any rate.

8. The Brand Upon the Brain!
Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee was simply my favorite Canadian narrative fiction film ever. In that film Guy placed himself back in time as a hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, in an era when his father actually coached the team, and works out some of his issues with the patriarch and the object of desire, typified by a woman getting an illegal abortion in the barbershop run by Guy’s mom (as Guy’s mom and aunt did run in real life). The Brand Upon the Brain is the follow up, throwing our fictional Guy Maddin into an even more fractured historicomythical landscape populated by orphans, mad scientists, Freudian epistemology, and a matriarch who sees everything from her phallic lighthouse tower. And womb water. Liberated from his native Winnipeg, shooting in Seattle, Maddin has finally let us see the sea – regarde la mer – like li’l Antoine at the end of The 400 Blows. By far his most erotic film, with a hot lesbian subplot done in the style of a Shakespearean comedy. A mid-September night’s dream, baby! Isabella Rossellini does the voice over. The music cascades. The brief stabs of color are like pearls of Kenneth Anger’s cum. At least as good as Cowards, if it understandably lacks something of that film’s power of Geist. A Deleuzean crystal of a film. Pure effloresce.

9. Southland Tales
Southland Tales is a speculist New Media speculum and a Wagnerian work of utter brazenness. Though the auteur – the young and very cheeky Richard Kelly – may claim to be invoking Philip K. Dick and pop art, the real sense for me was of an apocalyptic merger of Pynchon’s Vineland (with its lines of genealogical flight connecting with his “historical” novels) and the agitprop found footage work of Craig Baldwin fused with the frantic database filigreed by Baz Lurhmann’s architectonic Einstein/Eisenstein mescaline remote, straight from his Toulouse Lautrec cyber-squat. Wallace Shawn as the corporate standing reserve and crazed international superstar Bai Ling clearly make the best screen couple since Tom Noonan and Julie Haggerty in Noonan’s excellent 1995 Kammerspiel, The Wife, also featuring Mr. Shawn. As is Tony Scott’s Kelly-scripted Domino, the functioning chronotope here appears to be space-time in its very material mutability. This a film that comes very close to putting an image of our chaosmos under the glass like Fowles’ Collector, sieving from temporality the truth of its radical simultaneity. Not kitsch! Sean Cubitt eats this shit for breakfast.

10. No Country for Old Men
Obviously the cinematography both here and in the Deakin’s-shot The Assasination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford is remarkable, even boggling. This stuff sucks the light out of the rocks and employs a depth of field that, especially in No Country, you could burry a Visconti cast in like so many Waldos. The new Coen Bros. picture also earns the distinction of garnering my annual Robert Bresson award for excellence in sound (just think of Chigurh’s messianic candy wrapper uncrinkling like a prone scorpion). Of course No Country for Old Men reminds everyone who sees it of Blood Simple and Fargo and clearly they stand as a sort of cycle. Of course, you’d have to throw in literally all of their other films as well (including Crime Wave and The Hudsucker Proxy, both collaborations, on one level or another, with Sam Raimi). All of them reconstruct and reposition, in one way or another, the standard chronotopes of American crime fiction and popular cinema. Blood Simple, Fargo, and No Country stand apart for their earnestness and the kind of deep existential moorings synonymous with the best of Chandler, Goodis, Jim Thompson, et. all. There are passages of unmitigated sensation and objects loaded with so much kinetic Lacanian energy here that they trump North by Northwest, and Bardem’s sociopath is nearly as stunning as the one he rendered for Alex de la Iglesia’s border culture blitzkrieg, Perdita Durango, released exactly ten years previous. Hope he gets in the habit, as I’m sure does the sick scopophiliac in all of us, Jonathan Rosenbaum secretly included; it’s a pandemic in the cinema’s very helixes, inherent, even, to any dour humanist critic you might happen to name. We watch not only because we can: we must watch.