An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time. ” Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
There were many really great American films that made it into American mainstream cinemas last year, but before that discussion, many of the year’s subtlest foreign films were seen in MoMA’s The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule (selections from the past decade but the following are very recent):
SleepingSickness (Ulrich Köhler)
The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg)
In the Shadows (Thomas Arslan)
I am Guilty (Christoph Hochhäusler)
The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler -2010)
To say that they all share a post-Berlin Wall misanthropy is perhaps going a little far. But they all err in that direction. Nor do any of them need to be the enormous length of Filipino Liav Diaz whose latest (Norte, The End of History) played the NYFF while Batang Westside (5 hours) had a very rare airing as part of MoMA’s To Save and Protect. Diaz develops a strange hold on the viewer as the hours pass. Is it the plethora of detail (that his detractors argue could easily be honed down to 2hours)? Romanian director Cristi Puiu keeps his films short but with the same fascination about the intricacies of nothingness that become everything in our life: Three Interpretation Exercises as does Corneliu Porumboiu in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism.
The To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival is always a palace of delights catering to every celluloid desire. This year ranged from the Warhol world premiere of Tiger Morse and Markoupoulos’s short portraits, Bruce Connor’s Crossroads, Chantal Ackerman’s early New York films that resemble some contemporary video art in their stark slow long pans of rooms, hallways and streets. Alain Cavalier’s rivetting rarely seen French heist flic aired that never saw the light of American distribution day it was supposed to- Pillaged (Mise à sac). Fredric March‘s haunting, mundane and mesmeric performance in the 1951 Death of a Salesman (shamefully rarely seen due to rights issues) - making The Wolf of Wallstreet seem totally redundant not to say half-baked- and the chilling almost revolting 10 Rillington Place (selected by Alexander Payne) with Richard Attenborough (as the great young actor), and a baby John Hurt. Last year Studio Canal Blu-ray released the shamefully and unbelievably hitherto un-restored version of René Clément's Plein Soleil: actor Alain Delon's greatest director he states in an interview extra, Henri Decaë's lighting and cinematography, and a great Roman Polanski on set anecdote.
Couldn’t you just see one of Willy Loman’s boys perhaps become an American Hustle Carmine Polito – principled, honest and loyal to the core - utterly devoured by the system's sharks when he never even dained stepping on a jellyfish?
Hands Over the City (Eureka Blu-ray March 17), CriterionDVD
John Sayles latest Go For Sisters strangely didn’t get a look in at MoMA and as with all Sayles it is quietly coruscating: and though his characters inhabit a system, they are usually 100 timers stronger and more interesting than it. Dallas Buyer’s Club is just too good for words in so many respects- who knew a crooked kitsch painting on a wall could well the tears. What makes Nicole Holofcener’s films a pleasure always is her observation of human mundanity: Enough Said.
With MOMA ‘s Contenders season one almost had no need for eyes to creep into a multi-plex. There they all were/are including a brave programming of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma (King of independence) latest Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 -aisles crawling with cast members in all their distorted glory with an onstage dance routine to cap it all off. Bruce Dern was a great raconteur post Nebraska screening (he also turned out for the far less busy screening of Smile from 1975). Remember Silent Running (great Blu-ray extras) or The King of Marvin Gardens?
Avoiding Oscar talk for a film buff is like claiming ice cream means nothing to you in summer. Lactose intolerant get-out excuse maybe. Not sure what an Oscar equivalent of that might be. And whatever one may think of Scorsese's epic everyone must be glad he's finally had 'a hit' so that Hollywood can remember who he is and allow him to make another Hugo. “Nobody calls me,” said Silent Running's Douglas Trumbull at Locarno this year.
Very strange it was putting one’s hands- nay fingers - around the waist of a Joan Crawford dress not to say Doris Day. But where have all gone the human blooms? Is it false sentiment to almost treasure these things? The Maltese Falcon is perhaps more understandable. But the white dress of Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon whose legs leveled all Albert Camus philosophy? Tap shoes or anything of the Nicholas Brothers? If it was a choice between Astaire's black and white Band Wagon spats and...sometimes there is just no logic or deference to greater talent.
And so we have Steve McQueen’s ‘Hollywood music’ sprinkled real life 12 Years a Slave that undoubtably deserves much of its kudos. But a tiny few of us long for McQueen to return to the visceral viscous ‘art’ quietly applauded of yesteryear. Many cried sentimental of Lee Daniel’s The Butler – rather surely it is full of sentiment?! Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker giving really great-understated performances. Unless you’ve personally known someone such as Cecil Gaines The White House butler (what a fantastic real life story) perhaps it is hard to understand how such a double-life is lead and just how moving is the tie and tie-pin finale of that film. Could the same also be said of the Coen brothers Inside Llewyn Davis? Just how important truth over fun in music is for many who never reach the top of their profession and who for the life of them can’t lead a double-life?
The other night at MoMA Eszter Salamon: Dancefor Nothing brought everything down to earth with her dance interpretation of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing (originally published August 1959)- dancing whilst speaking the text and listening to Frances Marie-Uitti rendition on ear plugs) : “Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.” And yet the disabled cast members of Jerome Bel and Theatre Hora (New York Live Arts, Nov 12-17) appeared definitely excited to be going somewhere.
CarteBlanche: Ken Jacobs showcased Jacob's new 3D cam 4 parter Joys Of Waiting for the Broadway Bus - a far more revealing way of looking at the world than many a film you may see while Tim’s Vermeer in all its time-consuming research and dedication made one look and think again at what may or may not be so. For a very surrealist take on all that former Brit Independent on Sunday film critic Jonathan Romney made a highly original and accomplished short L'Assenza .
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is his most popular and (not wanting to deter anyone from seeing it) yet probably his least interesting film to date in its avoidance of complexity- he’s made some very strangewondrous movies. (UK Blu-ray -Jan 13), Criterion Collection (March 24). Yet maybe that view is bonkers. Because surely all the male protagonists of Sorrentino’s films wade inexorably through their demons while everything Sorrentino makes harks back to his first film One Man Up (L'uomo in più -2001). The Marcel Ophuls’ (Max’s son) documentary Ain't Misbehavin' on the other hand brims with survival of life’s rip tides and ironies.
Hans Josephsohn’s moving (in all senses of the word) sculptures are on view at Hauser and Wirth (New York)
"I live in this country [Japan] as the water insect lives in the pond, skating across the surface, not so much unmindful as incapable of seeing the depths"- writer and film historian Donald Ritchie who died last year-his own short films here. "I cannot imagine Plato thriving here, with all his absolutes (“the truth,” “the beauty”) … Maybe that is why Japan is so backward (by comparison) in some areas: philosophy, diagnosis. And perhaps why it is so forward in others.” Japan Society tribute. Thackeray or Jane Austen he thought would relish “the abyss between intention and fact.” In The Inland Sea (based on his 1971 book) he observes the West’s modern trinkets in cafes “ready to be put together like pieces of some giant scattered puzzle". Elia Kazan fought his way to America and always seemed in need of proof to himself: America, America (1963). But as critic David Bordwell observed of Ritchie, "he accepted being out of place".
Audible smile of the leaves,
Just the wind at that place,
If I gaze at you and you gaze
At me, who is it that smiles
First? The first to smile laughs.
Laughs, and gazes suddenly
So as not to gaze,
At where can be sensed in leaves
The noise of the breeze as it goes.
All is breeze and disguise.
But the gaze has returned from long
Gazing where gaze there's none;
And we two stand talking on
Of what words, as usual, shun.
Is it the ending or begun?
Fernando Pessoa
