The Zone

february, 5th

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:08:16 -0500

february, 5th

Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:42:04 -0500

Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975):

Fortunately Wiseman has avoided the distracting mantle of crusader or polemicist to become, in the old newsman’s phrase, one of the most trusted voices in film-making. He has refined his most characteristic form: a unity of deep-structural view with found vignettes, accumulated detail, and editing that circles, alights and suggests rather than binds. The nearly three-hour-long Welfare (1975), building on the loosely serial-format of Juvenile Court (1973), was the first triumph in this vein - a Beckett-referencing epic of stasis filmed within a New York aid centre. Petitioners queue endlessly to justify themselves to beleaguered desk employees and Wiseman’s knack with the material demonstrates the resourcefulness of a dramatist.

The documentaries range in length from about two to six hours. The roomier duration allows Wiseman to avoid constrictive expectations of traditional arcs and better reflect ambiguity. The scale of Wiseman’s associative editing schemes keeps metaphors and themes from feeling too rigid or explicit, aided by bumper montages that provide emotional buffers, dab in more detail or remind us of the broader geographical and societal background.

Where is my mind?

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 09:39:34 -0500

Where is my mind?:

Clark (and Heidegger) notwithstanding, tools – even very clever tools like iPhones – aren’t parts of minds. Nothing happens in your mind when your iPhone rings (unless, of course, you happen to hear it do so). That’s not, however, because iPhones are ‘external’, it’s because iPhones don’t, literally and unmetaphorically, have contents. But what about an iPhone’s ringing? That means something; it means that someone is calling. And it happens on the outside by anybody’s standard. And similarly, what about Otto’s notebook? It has lots of content (it contains, for example, the phone numbers of lots of his friends); and it’s about something – it’s about, for example, his friends’ phone numbers. And also, come to think of it, what about iPhones that have had numbers programmed in? So, even if shovels and the like can’t be parts of minds, how does insisting on the intensionality of the mental rule out notebooks and iPhones?

by vicente nieto canedo

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:13:13 -0500

by vicente nieto canedo

The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967)

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:11:59 -0500

The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967):

As to the unwritten rules of war, the Hungarian just doesn’t get it. The film opens with the group of Reds considering what to do with some captured Whites. To the scruffy officer in charge, shooting the lot of them seems the only option, but in a discordant, humane plea, the Hungarian talks him out of summary execution, and the men, after being ordered to strip, are sent running naked into the open countryside. Nudity once again signals humiliation, helplessness, and ultimate vulnerability, but it is a compromise with death and the first and only time the Hungarian, through his unsullied humanity, has any effect on events. Jancsó positioning Kozák as an unwitting pawn on history’s vast chessboard is reminiscent of Tolstoy placing the bumbling, idealistic Pierre Bezúkhov onto the battlefield of Borodino in War and Peace.

But whereas Jancsó intimates a Tolstoyan wisdom in his depiction of the cruel vagaries of war, he makes no effort to reveal the Hungarian’s internal grappling with larger truths, as Tolstoy does with Pierre. Rather, accomplished by very stylish filmmaking, there’s an emphasis on externals. The film’s black-and-white visuals are as lovely as ever, and the director’s camera movements, which track effortlessly through the action in those long takes, are even more sophisticated and exquisite than before. With a cool disinterest in any individual’s fate, waves of Whites might subsume a mass of Reds, who then turn and vanquish the other, but Jancsó uses no rapid crosscutting, only wide-eyed breathless sweeps.

In his Second Run interview, Jancsó is cagey about his luxuriously long takes, discussing them only as if they were a pragmatic choice, not an aesthetic one. There were 11 to 12 minutes in a 35mm cartridge, he explains, as if to imply that one should just use a single cartridge per take. But then, loosening up, he explains the complexities of arranging the actors and plotting the action around the layout of the dolly tracks, which of course determines the manner in which the camera will move through space. Thus, Jancsó designs these movements in advance of any shooting, as if they were choreographed steps in a ballet.

What Do Women Want?

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:06:31 -0500

What Do Women Want?:

Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of women’s arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the lab.

As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote “semantics” in the margin of my notes before she said, “The word ‘rape’ comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage.” She continued: “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, ‘Arousal is not consent.’ ”

by theo frey

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:35:38 -0500

by theo frey

Repentance (Tenghiz Abuladze, 1987)

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:33:31 -0500

Repentance (Tenghiz Abuladze, 1987):

Abuladze has called his film, which was finished in 1984 but wasn’t screened in the Soviet Union until the end of 1986 and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes last year, a “tragic phantasmagoria,” and in it he has blended surrealistic dreams, fantasies and magic to create an allegorical fascist wonderland.

The film’s approach is Orwellian; in scenes like the one in which Varlam visits the artist’s home, he turns around the meanings of words, spouts Shakespeare and Confucius (“It is hard to catch a black cat in a dark room. Especially if there is no cat”) and breaks repeatedly into operatic song to throw his hosts off balance. Varlam’s power over his regime is based on nonsense and confusion. Surrealism, in his world, is doublespeak.

Paul Celan, el moribundo enamorado

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:28:24 -0500

Paul Celan, el moribundo enamorado:

A su paso por Viena, en 1948, conoce y se enamora de la poeta Ingeborg Bachmann, hija de un maestro de Carintia miembro del partido nazi. Con Bachmann, Celan se encontrará varias veces más, sobre todo entre el otoño de 1957 y julio de 1958, recomponiendo un vínculo que unía a dos extraños a pesar de su amor. Cuando en 1948 llega a París, Celan frecuenta el círculo de su amigo rumano Isac Chiva, del que también participa Ariane Deluz, primera mujer de Chiva y amante de Celan entonces y en sus últimos años. Es precisamente Chiva quien presenta al poeta a la que será su futura mujer, la artista gráfica Gisèle Lestrange, e inmediatamente surge entre ambos una pasión intensa. En 1952 se casan y en 1955 tienen a su hijo Éric. Celan aspiraba a crear una familia como se aspira a tener una vida plena. Amaba a su mujer y a su hijo, pero no pudo alcanzar esa aspiración. Al final de la década de 1960, hubo de separarse de ellos y vivir solo. Antes, entre 1953 y 1962, Britta Eisenreich había sido su “mujer alemana”.

by von neloqua

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:51:07 -0500

by von neloqua

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:49:44 -0500

Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959):

Faces - most notably that of Michel - are at the extreme of impassivity, their materiality one of non-intervention, their sensuality undeniable and unchanging, frozen amid a quiet frenzy of signals and actions. Hands, most particularly, have an independent life and art; everything done with hands is part of or related to the central (and quite sexualized) metaphor of the film, picking pockets, and each gesture needs to be remembered by us for comparison and recognition at a later stage of the film. As if it were not enough to be a virtuoso of hands, throughout the film Michel sends tantalising signals with doors how he opens them, how he closes them, how he finds them and how he leaves them - because the film is about Michel’s movement being arrested finally, a closing stillness enforced by the prison cell door he cannot physically open, a material condition of the transformation he undergoes in this concluding scene.

El caso Echevarría: Sobre la independencia de la crítica

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:47:29 -0500

El caso Echevarría: Sobre la independencia de la crítica:

La publicación de la reseña provocó en la dirección del periódico una fuerte conmoción, que se tradujo de inmediato en un pautado despliegue de artículos, entrevistas y crónicas que, en conjunto, apuntaban tanto a paliar y neutralizar los posibles efectos de la reseña como a compensar a Bernardo Atxaga por los perjuicios de todo tipo que ésta pudiera acarrearle. En cualquier caso, la reacción fue tan desproporcionada, que llamó la atención de numerosos medios de prensa españoles, que se hicieron eco de ella de la más variada forma, en general con sorna, pero también con escándalo y con sorpresa.
Yo mismo quedé consternado, y más expuesto que nunca a las dudas de siempre, que me asaltaron con especial crudeza. ¿Tiene sentido ejercer la crítica en un medio dispuesto a desactivar los efectos de la misma y a desautorizar a su propio crítico? ¿Tiene sentido tratar de hacer una crítica más o menos exigente e independiente en un medio que parece privilegiar y defender a ultranza, sin el mínimo decoro, los intereses de una editorial que pertenece a su mismo grupo empresarial?

MET

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:51:49 -0500

MET

Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1987)

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:50:48 -0500

Family Viewing (Atom Egoyan, 1987):

A young man, about to finish high school, spends time faithfully attending to his Armenian grandmother, who resides in a run down nursing home. His father has relegated the old woman to this existence in order to help himself rid the memory of his former family life, with the boy’s mother. Soliciting direction from a phone-sex worker, the father shoots videos of the sex acts he engages in with his current lover, who is unduly attracted to the son. The son discovers that his father is taping over old videos documenting his happy childhood, when mother, father, and grandmother were present. With the help of another regular nursing home visitor, the boy tries to create a new life for his grandmother and himself , away from the influence of his father.

La Damnation de Faust

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:47:29 -0500

La Damnation de Faust:

Robert Lepage’s new production of La Damnation de Faust is an inventive marriage of traditional stagecraft and visionary technology. The creative wizard behind visually stunning shows for artists and companies ranging from Peter Gabriel to Cirque du Soleil to Seiji Ozawa, Lepage is at heart a master storyteller with the gift of being able to develop and harness technology to serve his intimate, human stories. In his hands, state-of-the-art video techniques are used to intensify the essence of a story, its emotional impact, and the work’s theatricality, as he tells the Met’s Elena Park. Lepage brings his visionary style to the Met for Berlioz’s “dramatic legend” (last heard here in 1907), which will be conducted by Music Director James Levine.

by bogdan zwir

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:46:49 -0500

by bogdan zwir

La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:45:17 -0500

La ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001):

Martel’s central critique of the decaying middle class seems to target the film’s women, who maintain a precarious power throughout the film. Upon her return from the hospital, Mecha spends her days in bed, afraid that she will turn into her mother, who spent her final years bedbound and irritable. Mecha does not appear to be as disabled by the accident as she makes herself out to be, and seems to be succumbing, in spite of her fears, to self-pity. At the same time, she continues to bark orders from her room and serve as leader of the household.

In one of her few sympathetic relationships, Mecha is visited by her best friend, Tali (Mercedes Morán), with her kids in tow. The time is just before school will begin again, and the women discuss an expedition to Bolivia for some discount school supply shopping and a girlfriends’ getaway. With both families circulating at Mecha’s home, the place is a circus, populated by overexcited children. The little boys run into the woods with guns for adventures; the girls dress up in gaudy make-up and costumes. And so, despite the affection Martel displays toward this female- female friendship, the women are portrayed as incapable—or simply uncaring about—disciplining their children or keeping watchful eyes on them.

El húngaro es el único idioma que el diablo respeta

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:39:00 -0500

El húngaro es el único idioma que el diablo respeta:

Pero ¿cuál es el problema con este idioma? Todo comienza con que el endemoniado húngaro no es de raíz indoeuropea, la antiquísima lengua madre que dio origen a más de 80 idiomas, entre ellos el latín–con sus nueve hijos– y el germánico, de donde provienen, entre otros, el inglés, el sueco, el danés y, claro, el alemán y hasta el islandés. A los húngaros les dio por hablar un idioma de base urálica, de la que sólo quedan tres lenguas: el húngaro, el estonio y el finés (o finlandés), que vienen siendo primos tan lejanos como el español y el rumano. Siendo así, uno prácticamente no reconoce ni una sola palabra, ni hablada ni escrita.

by joep r

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:44:55 -0500

by joep r

Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993)

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:41:00 -0500

Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993):

Kitano has made a film so deceptively careless that its deeper qualities can be easily overlooked. The dialogue is either emphatic or deflective - take your pick. Kitano concentrates so much on faces, but they never show us much, at least not what we expect. His characters react to violence - even when it is inflicted on them - with an ironic stoicism, not at all surprised to find a pistol pointing their direction. And the way he has of holding a shot a few beats after a scene has ended, leaving us to stare at a blank alley or an empty beach.

Kitano directs, writes and edits the film. And he stars. His face has been called “granitic” in its avoidance of facile expression. But the face expresses the same deadpan ferocity as the film. Joe Hisaishi composed an unostentatious, Tangerine Dream-like musical score. But as for the quality of the photography of Okinawa, I must happily disqualify myself. You see, I was living in Okinawa when Sonatine was filmed, and those resplendent, pellucid days, which Kitano captures so vividly, are almost too lovely to recall.