Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter

At first the concept seems born of filmmaker’s bravado, or a certain high-handedness in choosing subjects to document: in the year 2000, Nikolaus Geyrhalter traveled to twelve different parts of the globe (one for each month of the year) to create naturalistic portraits of traditional lifestyles at varying proximity to extinction. The subjects do all the talking, through their actions and through candid soliloquies to the camera. One could think of the people’s speech, on things like family, social mores, routines, and their relationships to the outside world, as a continuous monologue on disenfranchisement. By combinations of geography, politics, and language, they are separated from the rest of the world, but there is no pure isolation; it’s always diluted, to varying degrees, and the strength and character of their respective cultures indicates a connection to a human network that has changed and migrated continuously, like a cloud of global marbles.

Some episodes take place in classic examples of what people in the West think of as “the back of beyond” (Siberia, Greenland, Micronesia, Lapland), while others look at rather extreme interiors (Ladakh, Irian Jaya, the mountains of Yunnan), while others choose paradigms of human resistance to encroaching civilization (Aborigines in Arnhem Land, Tuareg in the Sahara, Himba people in Namibia, Nisga’a people in Canada, and Sardinian fisherfolk). We see about twenty minutes of footage from each place before the film arrives mechanically at the next. Once the camera is gone, it may seem as though these people and places return to the obscurity from whence they came. But a veil has been lifted, if momentarily. The film is not the exercise in globetrotting that it promises, but a snapshot of a moment in time, the litany of ends and beginnings that spells the destiny of the planet.

Elsewhere is free of commentary, or at least, from that of the filmmakers. The pronouncements by the people in front of the camera constitute its verbal articulation, whose inclusion acts as a form of commentary in itself. The time at which things feel most propagandist is in the British Columbia episode, when the First Nation protagonists carve ceremonial poles, parade in traditional dress, and speak formally about the gutting of their land by Western capitalists. That’s not to say that their plight isn’t quite poignant, but this part does have by far the more encompassing and direct plaintiveness of any of the film’s segments. For the most part, though, the film happens so quietly, and things occur to us so passively, that there could just as well be no demand on the audience whatever. But to be receptive to what we are seeing, from Elsewhere‘s very loud, millennial conceit on downward, is to recognize its concrete ramifications. This isn’t just a lone filmmaker documenting people before gamely setting off for the next wild location; he has an impact, as do his producers, drivers, and translators. There is no claim to the contrary. At one point, a member of a Muoso family in Southwestern China interrupt their evening meal to look through the camera’s viewfinder. True, things are falling away, the record of existence of these cultures being a signal of their transformation.

At the same time there is a sense of life coming into being at this moment, a hybridized existence that picks up from where tradition once defined everything. Perhaps paradoxically, this existence effectively dawns in the areas least associated with progress and change, where modernity has not fully penetrated. In all of the film’s subjects, traditional ways of life have not yet dried up, and yet there don’t seem to be any people for whom it has not made a large and permanent difference. The very presence of the filmmakers signals that these places are elsewhere no longer, that they are accessible now, numbers of a fading few frontiers whose secrets have yet to be totally compromised.

The people seem pretty attuned to how much the modern world is changing, and how that affects them, and it’s usually quite tangible. A young woman who Geyrhalter follows, a schoolteacher from an atoll in Micronesia, refers to the yearly crate of gifts dropped by an American airplane as “trash,” since that is what it is, once it’s been used up. Can we be willing to give a second thought to our garbage even if we don’t live on a small island? The lessons are right here with us, brought into sharp relief in the more fragile reaches of our world. The hunters in Greenland blame a crusading Brigitte Bardot for harming the seal trade from which they made a living. At the same time they are still in touch with how their dreams will predict whether a deer hunt will be successful (the most successful indicated by a dream of a beautiful Western woman – possibly with a French accent?). The parting scene with the two men shows one of the men shopping in a modern supermarket. Many of the people we meet in Geyrhalter’s film cannot be wholly self-reliant anymore. The have few options other than to pursue a traditional way of life (like the man from Sardinia who talks about having dropped out of school to pursue his ancestral occupation on a trawler), but at the same time cannot live it to the fullest because of being so entangled with a modern society that advances rapaciously.

In one sense Geyrhalter is depicting sensitive ecologies and shrinking ways of life. All the people in the film belong to small populations that would barely make a ripple if they were transplanted to even a modestly-sized city. But it is perhaps because of their smallness that they manage to keep what is uniquely theirs, even in the face of change. We follow a Saami herdsman and hunter in the north of Finland, a solitary man who nonetheless carries with him the teachings of his ancestors, albeit aided by a snowmobile and modern rifle. The Khanty herder in Siberia bemoans the ruinous impact of Russian oil companies but takes the minor compensation of being able to use their helicopters once in a while. Being brought into step with the contemporary world is, across the board, a deeply ambivalent process, and one finds one’s opinions on it bifurcated at nearly every possible juncture.

Just like the modern, the traditional elements of life refuse to stay put, changing shape in the minds of those who practice them. The Himba woman and senior wife in her family talks about how she and her husband kidnapped a younger woman he fancied to make her his second. The protests of the victim’s family caused them to return her and arrange a legitimate marriage. As she describes it she seems suspect of the practice, as well as quite aware of the overdetermined hatred she has for any wives subsequent to her. A Korowai man from West Papua talks about the good old days when his people would cook and eat a person accused of sorcery. In his nostalgia it is difficult to discern whether or not he prefers that to the comparatively less violent methods used now. Even though the Korowai maintain an essentially Stone Age lifestyle, it is not altogether immune to change – there are shifting elements within it.

The overall approach is a holistic one, blanketing wildly divergent territories with its unified tack. If it were not for the systematic way that the scenes are arranged, it would feel more like a collage than it does. But we can move from the arctic to the South Pacific to the desert and not be numbed to the immediacy of the individual experiences. So what, aside from analyzing the dreams of Greenlanders, are we doing here? Is the film’s angle meant to be environmental, political, sociological, or a complex aggregate thereof? Just as those things become increasingly intertwined in the Twenty-First Century, so, seemingly, does our collective destiny. Wanting us to think more about these aspects of life, to consider cause and effect as it resonates through all corners, the idea that the filmmakers drive forward is that the issues that come up repeatedly are, in fact, inseparable, if not one and the same.

The film is not burdened with the need to make a point, however. It is content with the people it is documenting acting as the main message, as obvious or ambiguous as it may be throughout different points in its four hours. Early on it becomes apparent that this isn’t just a travelogue with an inflated sense of purpose, nor does the preconceived exoticism of the locales diminish the intimate contact that takes place when the director pushes the red button. Quiet, lucid, fastidious, and without music, Elsewhere plants the viewer, like a fallen alien surveillance unit, in places that are remote, both literally and in spirit. But it also shows us how remoteness does not define these places, just as isolation does not define the people who live there.

What we experience in these glimpses is about both isolation and interconnection, about old and new ways jostling through the modern era. He is making a case that no place or culture is so cut off that nothing from the rest of the world affects it at all. That is demonstrated time and time again throughout the film, and this is where its political imperative exists. Because the things that are done in the developed world can manifest themselves even in these “elsewheres” – and often do, in more concentrated and urgent ways – so we should never think ourselves removed from them. Geyrhalter is taking us to places that feel like they should be marginal, of a separate world, and showing us that this is not the case at all. Nothing is beyond the pale now, and you can never be too far from civilization to matter. Whereas before the people in this film existed on the fringe of continental maps, or were lost in the indistinctness of an uncharted interior, or were denied recognition of who they were (some possibly still do), it no longer makes sense to define them in terms of their otherness to the developed world. We can, of course, still ignore what goes on in Greenland, Siberia, or Micronesia, but doing so detracts from our development, rather than advancing it.

Two Films by Robert Fenz

Filmmaker Robert Fenz is in the strange situation of being a visual artist with a musician’s way of dealing with the world. His films show an engagement with the people and places he documents that consists of reaction and riffing, using an internal melody continuously transposed, an abstract call-and-response with his surroundings. He has worked with both free jazz trumpeter Leo Smith and Belgian director Chantal Akerman, and seems to be a hitherto unimaginable synthesis of the two, a bridge between observational documentary and musical improvisation, as well as visual ethnography, exemplified in Correspondence (2011), an homage to Robert Gardner.

The Sole of the Foot (2011) was shot in three countries: Cuba, France, and Israel. Visually these places are pieced together in static imbedding of the camera, in thoughtful peregrinations, and short but precise portraits of people. Rather than exploring the uniqueness of each location, Fenz seems to be trying to find the points at which they are each indistinguishable from one another, working with this effect beyond the images themselves, in montage, layering, and paralleling. What’s striking about the three locations of the film is the ambiguity (not indistinctness, exactly) of their identities. Indeed, it would be implausible for a viewer to guess, without prior knowledge, that there were only three countries he or she were seeing – albeit different places within those countries. It is the middle-ness of Israel, France, Cuba, that puts them in proximity to one another, almost bordering each other and coalescing here, in spite of geographic separation. They have salient features that define them, to be sure, but each one seems to also possess countervailing effects that negate those identity markers, submerging them in a global slipstream.

The Sole of the Foot (2011)

In the case of France, it is its accessibility to external populations (formerly its paternalism, now more resembling an old father being brought to a nursing home by grown-up children) that nudges it toward an uncertain and landless center. What are we dealing with now? Is it still Paris – or is it Algiers, Dakar, Mayotte? There is no reconciling it with any of those fixed identities, in spite of the configurations in which people may cluster together. We don’t even suspect this to be Europe until a few white faces begin to intermingle with the black skin and head-wraps as everyone glumly makes their way underground to the metro (a reversal of Standish Lawder’s wry Necrology [1971], in which commuters float upward on an escalator to the beyond, all with the same blank commuters’ expression on their faces). There is a poignant scene with a North African man miming playing hand-drums to a cassette of an old song from his homeland, the reminiscence doubly poignant because it separated by time and distance.

For Israel, where he had gone as cinematographer on Akerman’s Là-bas (2006), Fenz skirts the country’s various borders, in reference to that country’s actual porousness that is nonetheless marked by a continuing quest for self-definition. Like France, it is a melting pot, but one of an entirely different character, with a contrasting urgency and, seemingly, of a different time. There is not much here that leaps out proclaiming “Israel!” – a difficult thing to achieve. People walk down the shaded alley of a shuk, the narrow band of sunlight on the ground creating the sense that they are traversing a narrow catwalk, a tightrope.

While Cuba is possibly the most inimitable place that the film ventures, Fenz focuses on its least definable faces. In spite of it being a photogenic place, only half-engaged with the rest of the world, a chronological curiosity with trenchant characteristics, he refuses all this individuality and persistence in favor of that which makes it an ephemeral space. Filmed from a distance, separate crowds of schoolchildren are at play, one on an upper level and one below in a courtyard, circulating and mingling like schools of amoebas on two sides of a petri dish. A group of middle-aged couples emerges like the undead from the darkness of a narrowly-lit street.

One of the best parts of experiencing this and Correspondence is seeing the far-flung places brought together, the varying tones of identification and losing oneself, done on film and in a resolutely visual manner, since virtually all of standard nonfiction is today done on video. It is unlikely that Fenz is simply a photochemical luddite, or trying to advocate a return to the more venerable format for all filmmakers. But to be sure, he personally seems to find the tactile command of exposure and grain to suit his requirements in film cameras, as well as a preference for the experience of viewing a flickering image as opposed to a constant one.

The Sole of the Foot (2011)

He exploits the potential disconnect between that sound can exert on the images, not creating a distraction from them, but perhaps subtly denaturing them, eliciting a feeling of being in multiple places at once without being able to readily establish any for sure. As we gaze out over the rooftops of a middle eastern city, the soundtrack is a claustrophobic field recording that sounds like the interior of a café. A shot of a field laborer on horseback, which looks, by all rights, like an exceedingly relaxed scene, becomes jarring by way of the sounds – the screaming of insects in the background is like the hum of airplanes, the crunch of dried grass under foot like incendiary bursts – and the way that the camera retreats and then advances, imparting nervousness. In other places, like the Israel/Syria border, where things should feel more intense, people stare off, drift off, perhaps feeling their surroundings much less acutely than we are.

Fenz has said that he thought of each place in terms of its inherent speed; France with a serrated slow/fast dynamic, Israel feeling quite slow but having this underlying velocity to its changes, Cuba with an inescapable and inexhaustible languor. It’s as though the internal contrasts of each place are what make them, in effect, so similar to one another. There isn’t much of an effort to define the separate places, so they wash together. From dissimilar moods we get a long-range, roundabout association; France and Israel are both places that are each never a single place; Cuba is simply Cuba, a pile-up of material epochs and geopolitical moments. The film’s most recognizable achievement for its human subjects is that it causes the viewer to consider them mainly in terms of the space they inhabit, not separately from it. Fenz uses contrasting fragments to comprise an entirety that doesn’t feel fragmented at all – it feels like a single entity, an everyplace wealthy with naked expressions.

Correspondence similarly triangulates to different parts of the globe, but does so with an approach that is quite different, and that brings to bear very specific meanings and references found in the places he visits. Following in the footsteps of filmmaker Robert Gardner, Fenz filmed in West Papua (where Gardner went to film for Dead Birds in 1961), Southwestern Ethiopia (for Rivers of Sand in 1973), and Varanasi (for Forest of Bliss in 1985). Yes, he is revisiting those films, at least the places in which they were filmed, but he does quite a bit more than just show the subjects from a different angle. This would be quite difficult given the time that has elapsed since Gardner visited them, and besides, that is not the intent. In communing with the films – whose influence can be felt at every turn, in spite all the change that has since occurred – he engages in a touching reflection on what it means to be filming other cultures in these places, without allowing background, text, or even thoughts, necessarily, intrude.

Correspondence (2011)

The film begins, and remains for a few minutes, in color, before changing to black and white, as though having been engulfed by a cleansing sandstorm. The introduction, with a Papuan man showing off a spearhead-scar on his leg, moving on to the ‘burning ghats’ of Varanasi at night, anticipate a certain overtness, even muscularity to the imagery. What follows is considerably more meditative that they would suggest. From high up in the air, we see great, woolly mountaintops, which could be Ethiopia, but are more likely in Papua, given their immensity. Unlike the latter place, in which the seer is always trying to connect with people across a veil of nature, Varanasi is a frontal, confrontational place. In a cafeteria off one of the city’s narrow lanes, several men sit in cramped silence, gazing directly into the camera.

We see the shadows of effervescent figures on a suspension bridge, the rushing water beneath them creating the effect of being on an industrial elevator rushing upwards, the horizontal animated into verticality, skywardness. Since the director’s relationship with photography is such a close one, and since photographer and documentarian are two very different people, meaning is allowed here to roam free within the boundaries of the image, perhaps even beyond it, rather than having to conform to the apparent shape of it. There is also the potential for undeniably photographic moments – the posed, the poised, the expectant ones – to become like mirages. In a group portrait of people huddled together closely wearing ceremonial masks, the point of view shudders wildly back and forth, rendering them a horizontal blur. Rickshaw men at night flicker in and out of the darkness

This is in fact a four-fold Gardner pilgrimage, as we end up in one more location: a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gazing outside to a wintry mix. Even though Fenz is filming through a frozen window, into stillness, the half-light causes the nitrate crystals in the film to dance with liquidity. This separates the prologue from the sequences to follow, almost suggesting that we are descending from Gardner’s immediate and intimate recollections into his shifting dreams of the people he has seen via a somber January evening at home, many years having passed. The artistic rendering of things, the abrupt changes and tricks of light, make things more remote, but they also make them stand out in greater relief in one’s memory. They are haunting because there is a stronger sense that they are being seen through they eyes of another, and thus are charged with uncertainty.

Correspondence (2011)

This film was left silent since the director had decided, while shooting and editing it, that rhythms imposed by sound, whether it be location recordings, music, or voices, would disrupt the rhythms that were being generated by the images working together. There is an amazing variety of texture – from harsh burlap to piercing splinters of silver light, to sun-washed desert rocks and the black shadows of dirt in the creases of the hands – achieved through different film stocks, cameras, and strategies. Perhaps the most visually arresting scene in the film – indeed, in any that spring to mind – is a scene of a Papuan woman, shown in black, white, and silver, washing clothes in a pond, which looks like liquid mercury, so luminously rich is the monochrome. It is reminiscent of Chris Rainier’s photographs from the highlands of Papua New Guinea, depicting masks and mummies in the sepulchral grays of engorged thunderclouds.

Fenz’s chosen method of editing (in the case of Correspondence, aided by Shiloh Cinquemani) leaves each shot the exact length of how he filmed it. So editing becomes mainly a matter of sequencing and deciding what to include, rather than extracting what is satisfactory from what has been completed. For Fenz, it is all or nothing; either an image is right or it isn’t. This is the most obvious corollary between his films and free jazz; firstly, a faith in the wisdom of the impulse, and secondly, making indeterminacy a primary factor while working diligently within one’s training (“chops,” as it were) guided by a recognizable vocabulary. Improvisation is little more than a combining of strategy with chance, all under the awning of prevailing conditions (and, a dwindling few would argue, cosmic influences). Life breaks into a momentary trot, and then returns to its languid pace. A woman cooking injera has to shoo a goat away when it gets a little too close to the pan. The filmmaker is following the motions, and intuitively looks for the moment when to stop rolling. This gives new and welcome integrity to the notion of ‘single-shot cinema.’

Although The Sole of the Foot and Correspondence are quite consistent with one another as coming from a well-defined artistic sensibility, the two films are, nonetheless, satisfyingly distinct from one another in their ways of representation, and of using representation. Still, it feels as though Fenz has not entirely surpassed the adherence to his most profound influences (not that he should ever need to; he’s in fairly good company as it is), a position most noticeable in his balancing of the intimately up-close with the anonymously distant, a juxtaposition that is straight out of Akerman. Nonetheless there is a third ingredient that he adds: the totality of the visual artistry, his involvement both in the capturing of the image and its processing.

Correspondence (2011)

Admittedly, Gardner is not the first touchstone that leaps to mind, but the way Correspondence follows the man’s receding shadow – even finding people (such as the scarred fellow in West Papua) who knew him way back when – and builds from it in an altogether different direction, show that Fenz is more than just a fan. Perhaps he is truly corresponding with Gardner, reporting back to him on what has changed, and what persists. And in making a film like this, an accumulation of impressions, he shows an innate connection to the predicaments, challenges, and feelings of being an ethnographer – how some things will always be guarded no matter how long you wait, and yet others will reveal their hidden colors in a flash, in spite of themselves.

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

With Leyla Zareh, Fereshteh Sadreorafai, Shahab Hoseini

Noora is an Iranian woman gradually and resolutely chipping away at the concentric walls surrounding her. As the obstacles pile up, revealed one at a time, she attempts to restack the sum total of a system that is stacked against her. A debarred lawyer with dangerous connections to human rights activists, she moves through a somber Tehran of art-nouveau buildings and spartan offices, bathed in nauseating clarity, as she tries to obtain visas for her and her husband, a journalist who has been targeted for censure in the past and is hiding in some undisclosed place. While the rules of her trip abroad (arranged for the purpose of a speaking engagement) are predetermined in detail, there is no doubt that she does not mean to follow it with a return to her country.

We follow Noora on numerous trips to the office of her visa sponsor, where the secretary, a short woman piled high with make-up, moves papers from a folder as though they were plates of glass, all the while assiduously avoiding eye contact with her. In her post-career career Noora works at home assembling decorative boxes. Throughout her days there is this sense of mobile tension, of things set into motion and moving forward quietly, and while more about them becomes clearer, like in the case of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman character, not a nip of where they might take us.

Without a husband present, with her, escorting her, simple bureaucratic tasks are difficult if not impossible to push through. She has his passport as well as her own, and tries to get through the red tape independently. She is also pregnant and trying to determine what, if anything, is wrong with the child. Even though behavior is tightly controlled the quality of life may be just as indifferent as before, with incompetent doctors and bribe demands still consistently there at every turn. There are clues here and there of a consortium of caring women, humanists and progressives, but she is smartly hesitant to contact them. One nurse whispers that she knows someone who can arrange an abortion for her. But as she works to overcome that which is in her way, there seems to arise an ever more apparent list of alternative options and ways out. And for all of her circumspection, she seems essentially to know where she is going, success having become a single pinpoint on the horizon. Her struggle for individual agency has become fruitless in Iran, and now her potential for helping others and herself can only be realized beyond its borders.

So things are extremely complicated right now. But, as we understand, there is no reason for them to be. The character faces much the same situation as the film’s director has, a hopeless waltz with a paranoid shad0w-government. As swift as the powers-that-be work, they need not invest much energy into subtlety. It seems distopian but, in light of the filmmaker’s experiences – including the high-profile imprisonment of fellow director and collaborator Jafar Panahi – and the environment from which the film originates, it is a more sober rendering than a short description would suggest. The more Rasoulof heightens that soberness, intensifying the hyperreal quality of the environment, the more infernal the workings seem. The points at which sound and image drift apart, thus, are hardly noticed when they occur, so understated is the shift in tone to subjectivity. So too when the present moment brushed past a moment in the future (as when the sound of the vaunted airplane fills our ears), as two continents floating by one another in the sea.

The situation is similar to Panahi’s The Circle (2000), a film in which female characters are on the run from authorities but their individual infractions are shrouded in ambiguity. Here we know what how Noora’s intentions are challenging the system, and it is still just as mystifying. Her story and many of the details of what is going on with her have to emerge piece by piece, because people seem just as wary of being overheard as Rasoulof is of being censored and silenced. Their light treading is just as – if not more – telling than the things they say. Likewise the writer-director acheives a deeper level of communication through stillness, silence, and darkness, expresses the emotional reality of a state in which expression is smothered. Mundane activities are loaded with tremulous dread and horrible inevitability. When something bad does happen, it is diquietingly without drama – a fact of life, unimpedable.

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Mohsen Abdolvahab’s film Mainline (2006) is, on its most obvious level, a film about a social problem – drug addiction among Iran’s youth. At the same time, however, it’s a film that comes across as a rather conservative response to the social problems in general that face the country today, the implication being that things like drug addiction arise when the iron fists of theocracy and autocracy are relaxed, that more personal freedom leads to deterioration, that privilege and comfort erode moral fabric. Rasoulof’s film arises from an altogether separate view of things, a different climate under the same roof. In it people have been made so fearful of self-fulfillment that they rule only the perfunctory tasks and are in turn ruled by them. Surroundings are featureless, the only joys coming from the brief but frequent glints of human connection. The city is swarming, unrelenting, but eerily free of reflections and stimulae, like Brazil (1985) with SIM cards.

There are no sounds but the periodic roar and rumble of an airplane’s takeoff (always an intimation, outside the line of sight), the jacked-up swirl of traffic noise, or people’s voices being absorbed by the deathly non-reverberant rooms. The sterility of the setting is created impeccably through silences, a benumbed pallet of gray and cerulean, and cold light that comes in to the image via windows to flood and flatten it. From the top of a hill, the speed and mass of the city is softened by distance, reduced to a boundless impression in thick murk, a subtle grinding at the recesses.

Even before we are shown outright, it feels that she is being traced throughout her day, that it would be impossible for her not to be. But the security measures seem without specificity, and so routine that we believe she may outwit them. The parallel between her wanting to keep the child and the director’s desire to see the film come to fruition is hard to miss. Like Noora, he wants his issue to be born into a sort of freedom that he does not know at the present time, a carrier of his grief and repression that will find its rendering in a foreign land. In this sense it is his imagined goodbye note to Iran. He is not dissimilar to his heroine, who has already fought and made a difference in her country, and is now being blocked from attaining the most basic human rights. The state will try as it might to stop him, but the fact that we can see his films shows that it has not gotten the final word.

For their monthly series ‘Light Reading,’ ArtsEmerson brought together, on January 21st, selections from the New York Film Festival’s ‘Views From the Avant Garde’ and the Toronto Film Festival’s ‘Wavelengths’ from 2011. This was their second year doing such a screening, and while the lag-time for the Boston appearance of films picked for such illustrious categories is always lamentable (particularly considering the number of local filmmakers included), the opportunity to see both in one place more than makes up for that. The very title of NYFF’s series is quite pleasing, using the words ‘avant garde’ (being at the front line) to also connote a looking out at the world, to far-off vistas, while being also being rooted in a particular historical moment. With several of the films selected, that was literally the contiguous strand connecting them. While one reviewer of the NYFF’s lineup last year found the growing tendency in avant garde film toward ethnography to be disturbing and problematic, most of the films here seem highly engaged with, if not entirely hung up on, questions of representation when it comes to including people and cultures. The two big themes that seemed the most present in the night’s selections are: reaching epiphanies in a foreign place, and attempting to maintain the photographic properties inherent in filmmaking while transitioning to digital.

Feeling one’s own otherness, reconciling the impressions of a strange land with personal modes of viewing things, is a common theme that ties in with spectatorship as well, helping to define the artist as a spectator as much as the viewer. In Jonathan Schwartz’s short film A Preface to Red, which played at both Toronto and New York, the filmmaker takes footage of Istanbul, going back and forth on the Bosphoros ferry between Asia and Europe, to create what he calls a cross-border dialogue. Negotiating a split personality of the city (or personalities, as nearly everything seems bifurcated by contrasting, even opposing ideologies, lifestyles, and time frames), the work is just as much about the diverging experiences of the filmmaker as what he is presenting as the actuality of the place, the political and sociological elements that comprise the surface. Both elements are subtext, and both are also the most obvious layers. The visual components coalesce to become a plane of superimpositions, a stacking of transparencies that alter and express another.

Tin Pressed (2011)

While the shots take the form of documentation – a traffic jam at night, a parade of people in traditional dress, streets, shops, and the water – Schwartz refrains from connecting them in coherence, looking at them instead as a series of emotional responses. In contrast to the unhurried life present in the imagery, the soundtrack is violent; the noise of a traffic-filled tunnel, processed electronically. While the audio feels like an amplification of sounds natural to the setting, illiciting a feeling of closeness to the city, it also functions as a cautionary roar, a modulation of reality that holds it back. Versus the up-close anthropology of the films of Kathryn Ramey (who draws a distinction between her own approach and Schwartz’s methods of distancing himself) this seems as much a statement on identification as a reasassembling of the concrete from a morass of subjectivity, a broken-up mirroring of reality that equally communicates its randomness. As distanced as it is, the personal experience of distance surrounds it. And to be sure, it lacks intimacy, but the effect of it is relatable; to summon recognition in the strange, and to develop a self-awareness in surroundings that have nothing to do with oneself, are things we often try to do visually, and thus we have much in common with homesick filmmakers.

Dani Levanthal’s Tin Pressed does a similar thing in a much more contentious place, showing individual fragments of Israel and Palestine, beginning with someone being quietly beaten up on a streetcorner at night. Things become gentler from there (depending on one’s views), moving to sides of cow hanging in a butcher shop, and silvery shad floating in a bucket of water at the market. Leventhal definitely seems to be reintroducing the realm of digital with the photographic, while it is debatable that the two were ever acquainted, let alone one being descended from the other. The video emphasizes the wild ups and downs of daily life; while conflict is part of the reality of these places, it is not the defining reality. Politics, religion, culture, are real things but not everything and, in some ways, are so steadily volatile that they fade into the background. People kill animals and life goes on. In one sense a personal diary of a trip to Prague, Saul Levine’s Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK seems an attempt at melding the realities of indeterminacy – inconsistencies, light leaks, as it were – with more structured elements extant in the filmmaker’s surroundings, such as architecture and his mind’s organizing of what is around him. The light starts to form buildings of its own, triumphal arches and spheres that merge into one another, penumbrae around the lights of looming vitality that are both documented and reimagined here. While Jordan Belson’s abstractions were a look at the vision generated behind the eye, Levine’s work is always equally introspective, but more about the eye/mind dialogue, being only half about imagery.

Posthaste Perennial Pattern (2010)

A partially historical film whose footage dates from 1986, Chick Strand began Woman With Flowers as a project in 1995. It was completed, posthumously, for release in 2011 by colleagues of Strand’s. On one hand, the film recalls Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory (1986), also shot in Mexico, which poses a comment on womanhood and gendered industry in the modernized world. Like the synthetic objects in that film, the flowers that the woman sells door to door become extensions of her personal grief, as well as the bleak solitude of women’s suffering. But here it is a pre-modern type of work in which she engages, which continues in solemn dignity but inwardly relates a tale of woe, to be read all over it. Like in the earlier film, we hear a narration attributable to the subject, as she talks about having a drunken and murderous husband. We see images of her washing playfully in a river, squired by her daughter, and walking through a beautiful field that to her must represent a green hell. There is an incongruity between the speech on the soundtrack and the imagery, but only just barely – as we come to be more familiar with both, the connections start to materialize, and the images begin to speak of liberation, or degrees of it, that would not be apparent if we only saw the woman at work. The film combines the visual intimacy of Bruce Baillie’s stoically contemplative Valentin de Las Sierras (1971) with the sociological narrative of her own earlier work. On top of the woman and the vivid blur of Strand’s photography, expansive, vaguely industrial music has been added. It’s hard to tell what, if anything, was entirely her work – the editing, the soundtrack, etc. – and what was added after her death in 2009. Disparate as the collective elements are, the end result is fully exhuberant and haunting, sumptuous and melancholy.

To balance out the films about being elsewhere and the wideness of the world are their (on paper, at least) polar opposites, films whose materials extend no farther than what already exists on hand. Jodie Mack’s animation is, evidently, almost always comprised of materials found at home. For Posthaste Perennial Pattern she uses just that, varied floral designs on fabric, shown in rapid, almost violent succession. While at times it resembles conventional animation (in the sense of describing continuous motion – which, she says, like Robert Breer, she consciously refrains from), with flowers seemingly blooming and contracting, this is certainly an impression brought on by the slew of mass-produced familiarity. The film draws on the nature simulacrum locked in the fabric surfaces (along with a soundtrack of an unaffected recording of birdsong outside the window), and at the same time hinting at a pulsing artistic energy dormant in generations of domesticity and consumerism. Roles and symbols, flattened and reduced, get a new life by the motion that emerges from their sequencing, just like how the otherwise flatly abstracted flowers acheive growth and vividness before our eyes.

Miniatures (2011)

Also from the home front were three short shorts by Stephanie Barber, utilizing pre-existing works (miniature portraits in one, a book about Degas in another, photographs from an eclipse that happened in 1900 in a third) to engage in an intimate communion with past moments that emphasizes a kind of cyclical connection to the present, neither confined to contemporary definition nor tied to a state of being over-with. The videos also try to infuse the inertia of art history with colorful liveliness. On the more structural side of things was Shiloh Cinquemani’s film of railroad tracks in Berlin that become alternating streams of cardinal and horizontal paths. The film divines a lateral motion through static shots of the shape of the tracks, the steel rails glinting like beams of light. Vincent Grenier’s study of an alley way, Back View, is shot from a high back window. Walled in by two buildings, one with a green fire escape and one with a black fire escape, the sunlight that comes down onto the pavement experiences jumps and interruptions as it time-lapses across the screen. Natural sound seems to lead the light on its path (or perhaps it’s vice versa), as it bounces to the sounds of extraneous music. And then the sky gets overcast with rain, causing the frame to become static once again, and rendering the buildings a soft reflection. Veteran experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton’s digital work was sallow next to the 16- and 8mm pieces, showing images of zoo animals side-by-side with video transformation, the eight-part circular reflection that renders everything a tube, each motion a shift in the geometric display of a kaleidoscope. An orangutan creates concentric rings of red hair, a python’s careful movement fans out as necklaces and beams. The problem with having such a varied program is that some works might be far from their intended context, especially ones that are closer to installation or visual art. Here we seem to be seeing the one-time elapsing of what is by nature a loop. The obviousness of the process seems to impose a schema on the work itself, and not being an adequate stand-in for rigor or ideas, exists only as well-defined exercises.

Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Sounding Glass got a disappointingly slight audience response, considering how powerfully it negates the notion of DV as lacking in consistency or intensity. A stroboscopic gallery of degraded black and white, it depicts a man seated in a tree. At first it is uncertain whether he is meant as the subject or the spectator of the successive images, which are sodden with grim portent, enshrouded by a seething cello soundtrack and changing surreptitiously, like a painting of action that appears to move when one’s concentration on it is interrupted. The strobe effect adds external augenblicken on one’s experience, taking the continuity of the images out of our perception and subjecting it to new and forceful intervals. From the UK, Samantha Rebello’s Forms Are Not Self-Subsitant Substances explores stone-carved symbolry in a cathedral, emerging from the darkness of a grand nave. Blobs of light become pigeons milling around, an intrusion of nature into man’s stone edifices. Medieval pictures of hunted animals and animals devouring people mix signs and lore, and, coupled with a misspelled shopping list of animal products, try to ‘scramble’ power relationships in civilization but come up dull rather than jarring. Chunks of gore sit limpidly in a frying pan, acted upon but inert. The film is bookended by quotations from Aristotle about substance, which might address notions of independent existence and control in eating meat (devouring the particles that come together to comprise us), but feel like little more than hipster philosophy-pasting; its result is more an equation than a jeremiad. Things feel too schematic to have sympathetic impact, and the images don’t have enough power to activate and openly challenge one another, and thus get isolated in a bath of tedium.

Back View (2011)

The one entirely historic film of the night was Joyce Wieland’s Sailboat (1967). In it, against an electric-blue background of sea and sky, a sail boat perpetually drifts across the screen. When it passes the edge of the frame, the camera is repositioned so that it starts its journey again. One of the film’s most remarkable facets is its ability to intimate a feeling of dread through a minimalist, almost purely photographic image. Combined with the text saying “sailboat” at the top of the screen, the endless path of the boat seems to be keeping it imprisoned in its objecthood, its flattened chromaticity, not allowing it to break free into real or three-dimensional space. One almost feels sorry for the poor thing, hoping, each time it reaches the end of the horizon line, that it will find a way to fall off into the void behind the sea. John Price’s Sea Series #10 seemed like it could have been an open homage to Wieland’s film, the frame cut in half by the horizon filmed from the seashore. At first blush it is another exploration of the architecture of a frame, completed with the horizontal lines of the ocean. From the opening blue wash it progresses into high-contrast, black and white shot of a beach, seemingly composed of still photographs animated into a moving sequence. The Kodak film matrices that dart vertically across the screen in this part, along with the overall hand-developed look of it, make it seem like an overt polemic championing a moribund medium.

The works of T. Marie that were presented, from a series of Optra Fields, show intricate, computer-generated patterns of lines that gradually drift together to form different images, giving a sense of periodicity even though the change happens at an almost imperceptable level. The more one concentrates on the designs, the stranger it feels when one realizes they have already transformed – black has become white, step-well crenellations have become a flat and geometric plane, shards have become continents. A challenge of focus and the senses, the pieces (one tries to avoid possibly offending by calling them “films”) were chosen to start off this line-up, and served as a cleansing barrier between daily discussion and the discourses on sight that followed. Although technical difficulties cut the last of the three Optra Fields short, Marie wanted to make it known that it contained a dedication at the end to the late sound artist Maryanne Amacher. Indeed, what much of Amacher’s work does sonically – an opening-up of the auditory potential of human beings, wherein the ear creates sympathetic resonances itself, acting as an instrument - Marie’s pieces achieve in the totally visual, entirely silent realm. In mediating the bounds of what is perceived against available stimulae, she expands that interplay, illiciting unexplored potential in the mind’s propensity for patterning.

Optra Field VII-IX (2011)

Present at the screening were Levine, Mack, and Schwartz, all three of whom have experience as artists, teachers, and curators. Levine spoke at great length about trying different ways to introduce improvisation into his process. Having been a super-8 filmmaker since the 1960′s, Levine has been a vital member of Boston’s experimental film community for many years, both by creating important films and influencing successive generations of filmmakers at Massachusetts College of Art. He also spoke, in specific terms, of the setting of his film, of Central Europe as being a place where he had a lot of preconceptions resting, and about how going there was a way to either alleviate or at least transform the painful images that had been stored up.

True to the themes her work touches upon, Mack played the role of primitive materialist, her film being both an answer to material consumption and itself a cataloging of designs, which, she says, in spite of their utilitarian origins, bear a lot of resemblance to abstract art. This close and often-resisted (but equally often discussed) relationship between the abstract, the personal, and the publicly useful was a consistent theme throughout the talk that the artists did. While filmmaker Robert Todd, who was in the audience, posed the idea of achieving a kind of spiritual ascendance (intersecting with Levine’s notion that abstraction – particularly in film – is a way for secular nonbelievers to have pseudo-religious visions), the talk ended up at the theme of social utility in experimentation. The fact that a social message cannot always easily be divined from the most abstract work – or even the decidedly less abstract work, for that matter – doesn’t preclude a film from having concrete implications and potential for real-world change, for the impact can be quite indirect or circuitous. If an artistic creation is important to someone, even just the person who made it, then it already has presence in reality and affects it. Schwartz’s work of late (but even going back to 2002′s Den of Tigers) has been highly personal but also very much about reaching for an interface, or generating a medium, through which to engage with a society. He said that he depends on the audience to complete the realization of a work, citing Duchamp’s notion that the creative act is only half done by the artist. And, as Levine put it, each one of them is part of an active, living and important social movement – avant garde film.

Sailboat (1967)

A Book by Arthur Nolletti, Jr.

University of Indiana Press, 2005.

Hands down the definitive English text about Japanese filmmaker Heinosuke Gosho (and really the only work in English to take a comprehensive look at his nearly fifty-year career in movies), Arthur Nolletti, Jr.’s Laughter Through Tears is a book that is at once dense with precise and valuable observations, and at the same time lighthearted, breathable, and perfectly navigable as an exhaustive surveying ought to be. In it the author locates an essential kernel – not so much a theme as a tone – in each of the director’s existing films, a bittersweet coalescence of pain and joy that make them special. This can be found through a wide range of films that span different genres, topics, and styles. Primarily, but not exclusively, focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary people, Gosho sought out the beauty hidden within sad situations, as well as the sadness to be found beneath life’s pleasures.

In his introduction, Nolletti makes it seem as though he began his personal odyssey as a neophyte, having been bound to the director’s work through a happy accident, quickly filling the role of chronicler of all things Gosho. Fortunately, however, he in fact has a much broader ability to interpret and compare films than he lets on, unlike other writers who are monogamously attached to a single director. He breaks down significant scenes shot by shot (a particularly important method for reading a director who favored narrative construction through editing), draws parallels with such Gosho contemporaries as Shimazu and Mizoguchi (never affording them an undue level of coverage), and generally proves why he considers this body of work so special. In other words, he isn’t short of perspective, as personally invested in Gosho’s films as he is. At times the points become a little repetitious (one would soon tire if keeping a running tally of the number of times Nolletti uses the words “laughter” and “tears” in the same sentence) but thankfully the films and periods of Gosho’s career he chooses are varied enough so that the discussions take many forms, even if the final analyses may seem a bit one-note.

The “Goshoism” to which Nolletti continually returns is the common thread that he picks up throughout all manner of genres, including ‘nonsense’ comedies of the silent era and junbungaku (‘pure literature’ films), a distinctive mark that make Gosho films inimitable and cohesive in terms of his whole career.

In his survey of Gosho’s career, Nolletti singles out a few of the most important films to write about, ones that were well-known (if not blockbusters) and that best represent the continuities that the author wants to show. He moves chronologically, through early comedies of the 1920s and ’30s, a break during the artistic oppression of wartime, a new discovery of romanticism in the late 1940s, to his most enduring social films of the 1950s, followed by a final period of restless innovation. Gosho directed possibly more than 100 films, and seems to have been very hit-or-miss throughout. It would seem all of the films of the 1920s are lost, with only a fraction of those of the prolific 1930s still surviving. He divides the 1930s into two types of comedy, ‘nonsense’ (largely physical) and shomin (slice-of-life), the former represented by The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine and the latter represented by Burden of Life.

The central epithet in Burden of Life is just that: a “burden,” as Fukushima, the father in a middle-class family, refers to each of his children. In the case of his two grown daughters, the release of that burden means marrying them off, which gets accomplished early on in the film. For his young son, Kan-chan, who is probably about eight years old, the sentence will be much longer. The father considers the boy a failure and longs to be rid of him, making no secret about his feelings. Yes, there is laughter through tears here, but it seems to be our laughter in light of their tears. There are moments in the film that are so horrible that they make us laugh, but it is a sort of stunned laugh, not empathetic. The boy’s mother ends up taking him away with her to live elsewhere, and Fukushima tries hard to convince her to return, minus their son.

Burden of Life feels, at the end, a very disturbing film in its own way, but Gosho’s efforts to make it true to life strengthens its resolve to the themes, as close as it sways to dark satire. It is so narratively slight that it feels like an overlong public service announcement on valuing your children’s individuality. One parent excoriates the young boy, the other feels pity for him. This is clearly no way to grow up. In Nolletti’s chapter on the film, however, he positions it as an important bridge between the ‘nonsense’ comedies and the shomin-geki where he would find his favored niche. Is the father’s disapproval meant to be funny? While the film feels like a consummate shomin-geki one starts to see Nolletti’s point when he describes how absurd the father is. This doesn’t diminish how disturbing the film is, and the roughly-drawn characters and the happily dismissive ending, if anything, constitute its closest ties to ‘nonsense’ comedy. The seriousness of what the film deals with (in spite of its light treatment) connects it to Gosho’s adaptation of Dancing Girl of Izu, a film that seems to be, in terms of Gosho’s ‘30s films, the most ideal example of the humor and pathos blend that Nolletti cherishes. (It actually oozes that blend, and at times goes overboard with that tone of contrast, but generally keeps an even keel). It is silent, and its narrative intertitles seem to be a nod to Kawabata’s book, making up for places where he and screenwriter Akira Fushimi changed the story, at the same time enhancing the histrionic tone of the film.

In Woman of the Mist, however, his blending of melodrama and the shomin-geki goes beyond the usual notion of “Goshoism,” prompting us to deeper feeling and thought about the many contradictions – and injustices – that are part of life. Thus, Woman of the Mist is more than a character study or a melodrama or a shomin-geki drama. It not only sums up Gosho’s work in the 30s but also effectively points the way for his work to come.

Indeed, the textures and feelings of daily life found in the shomin-geki echo into later works that could more easily be defined in terms of melodrama, psychological study, or historical picture.

In the main body of the book Nolletti devotes less than four pages to discussing Dispersing Clouds (and then, partly used as a comparison to Elegy of the North), clearly considering it a minor work. In it a young girl from Tokyo named Masako, falls ill while on a trip to the countryside with her friends. They take her to a local inn where she is gradually nursed back to health by a kindly maid named Osen, along with the help of a country doctor, a young man who teaches her about the difficulties of living in a place with few modern amenities. She gets visited by her busy stepmother, with whom she clearly has some underlying tensions, and then by her yet busier father, but she seems in no hurry to return to the city. Getting to know the maid and the doctor, she finds that both also come from Tokyo originally, but have come to the countryside to escape from their painful lives and to become immersed in a different and less hectic way of life.

Avowedly auteurist as the book is, Nolletti says relatively little about cinematography. The bulk of the technical discussion concerning how the images form the narratives is dominated by editing, which is given such thoughtful and in-depth treatment as to more than make up for separate deficiencies. The focus on editing gives the author something concrete with which to pin down Gosho’s work, for the director was never as formally and thematically consistent as Ozu, to his credit. Nolletti uses, as comparison, Ernst Lubitsch’s analytic editing (which he cites as a major influence on Gosho’s methods) and Frank Borzage’s use of decoupage. It’s unclear whether or not Gosho watched any of Borzage’s films, but the latter represents an American soulmate of his, in both style and theme.

The running social commentary throughout Gosho’s films seems to experience precipitous peaks and troughs, sometimes dictated by external conditions, and possibly culminating with Innocent Witch (1965) a wartime drama that Nolletti characterizes as most jarring and tragic. At times he tries to portray Gosho as an auteur with a vision that radically breaks with accepted norms, but never entirely follows through with the thought, always leaving it at the wayside. It always seems secondary to his central concern of the laughter/tears quotient. If not altogether radical, films from this period at least have relevance to call their own. Nolletti explains:

In An Innocent Witch and Rebellion of Japan [1967], Gosho’s focus on the impact of the war on the main characters implicitly invites audiences to reflect on the relevance of that event to their own lives, especially at a time of unparalleled economic growth. In The Hunting Rifle [1961], which is set in the present, Gosho invites reflection on the impact of prosperity itself… These three films may not ask us to laugh through tears, or even to laugh at all, but like all of Gosho’s melodramas, they are infused with pathos. They compel us to care.

In his discussion of Growing Up (1955) (which sounds as though could be the most despairing of Gosho’s mature shomin films of the 1950s), the film makes an effort at “unmasking of societal contradictions and revealing the attendant psychic tensions.” In such a disturbing slice of life, which deals with the varying levels of abject slavery experienced by women destined to lives of prostitution, how intent is Gosho on “lacerating” notions of gender roles in society? The answer should be obvious, given Gosho’s leftist credentials (he participated in sit-ins during the late 1940s strikes at Toho studio, putting an end to the most lucrative passage of his career in order to show solidarity with the workers). But at the same time the author’s proclamations themselves don’t constitute an adequate endorsement of this view, and since there isn’t much else to draw from, the reader is left with an incomplete picture of Gosho’s politics, and the feeling that some of these social readings of his films are imposed, at times overbearingly. However evident the film’s critique may be, this does not necessarily add up to a deep commitment to social change.

Perhaps Gosho’s views will remain obscure, behind platitudes and quotable proclamations, not to be spelled out through his work. Through the fog comes Elegy of the North, a sort of twisted Brief Encounter, representing an atypical take on romance in Gosho land. Nolletti places the film among Gosho’s various and variously-successful career departures of the late 1950′s. Two others about which he writes at some length are The Fireflies (1958) (an attempt at a straightforward war drama) and Yellow Crow (1957) (a film that utilizes color to create a portrait of a troubled young boy). None of these, including Elegy of the North seem to fit comfortably in any of the book’s hard-won postulates concerning what makes a Gosho film, and thus become stand-alone oddities.

The heroine of the film, infinitely more complex than that of Dispersing Clouds, is unusual for any sort of film, for being deformed both physically and emotionally. Like Masako, she gets compared to the Mona Lisa and, like Masako, she is without her mother. There is something uncanny in Reiko’s youthfully uninflected face. She registers emotions, but we can visibly see how they come to her through a filter of distortion, blunted to become disquietingly single-pointed. To Reiko, torturing other people is sport. At home the young woman, who can’t be older than twenty, is nagged by her father and grandmother for being tomboyish and unmarriageable. She goes on dates with Katusgari, a married man who, unable to understand her, settles for being possessed by her. He sketches pictures of Angkor Wat, a place he visited a long time ago, and which now fascinates her. The cavernously overgrown temples form a symbol of what she sees as something nestled within his life and out of her reach, something serene, mysterious, and far-away that she wants to hold some personal meaning.

Early in the film Reiko, hanging around his family’s house, sees his wife Akiko bidding farewell to her lover, a student named Tatsumi. Reiko decides to stalk them, watching their drama play out from a close distance, eventually befriending them without revealing who she really is. The secrets she knows about the prim and glamorous Akiko, along with the dual life she has fashioned for herself, seem to bring enjoyment to her strange, adolescent mind. It isn’t happiness, but the thrill of the hunt. At one point, likening Akiko to a swan, she then mimes being a swan-hunter, turning a compliment into an obscure threat.

In two lengthy chapters, Nolletti favors Where Chimneys Are Seen and An Inn at Osaka (1954) as significant examples of the way Gosho uses the essences of everyday life as a peculiar type of dramatic fodder, which highlights the humor and the pain latent all the time, making of those situations a double-sided mirror whose two facets are of equal importance. A film like Elegy of the North shows an additional degree of complexity to Gosho’s films after his wartime hiatus. In it the main character’s perversity comes from her uncanniness, far removed from lasciviousness or violence. Her imbalances reveal, by proximity, those of the supposedly more stable people she sets out to destroy. Nonetheless her lover defiantly clutches onto his own equanimity, frustrating her. In spite of the masochism and bizarre attractions the film grows, it also manages nostalgia, acute expression, and powerful atmospheres like those that make Woman of the Mist such a treat.

Directed by Uruphong Raksasad

With Prayad Jumma, Somnuek Mungmeung, Sai Jumma

A young family man, a Thai peasant named Mungmeung, relates to his friend his financial troubles. “It’s easy to get loans,” he sighs despondently. “But paying them back is another story.” Indeed, he is the ideal candidate for those who give out the loans – he has a family, no resources to pay back with any expedience, only his work to offer – the type who can easily be locked into debt for life. The other man offers a plot of his own land that the family can use and share in the harvest, loan-free. So Mungmeung, his family, and his brother and his family, default and move onto their new plot to start anew.

Life doesn’t get any easier for him and his wife, but they have high hopes: one day sending the children to school, a future away from the rice paddies. While they may not owe anyone, but they have moved from the technological assistance of the farm to a more basic way of doing things. They must shake the grain from the stalks by hand and train some unruly water buffalo from the start. Their neighbor, who often visits, brings them in contact with a back-to-the-land mentality. A retired teacher, he farms on a large plot by himself, threshing the rice with a bicycle-powered device, and dreams of setting up a shelter for animals of all sorts.

Their lives are a combination of subsistence farming and working for someone else. As a result, striving for calories takes on many varied activities. Two men visit a Buddhist shrine, briefly pray to a Garuda statue, and get down to business: obtaining the beehive hanging up at the top of the stupa. At one point they pull a honeycomb down from a branch, with shockingly little protective clothing on, and the kids scoop out honey with their bare hands. Roasted rodents, baked fowl, and snake salad all feature in the somewhat random diet formed by what they can hunt down on their land.

The reason for all this work is, of course, to live to keep working, so locked are the farmers into a predestined step and pace. This is the story of most of the human beings on the planet: debt, work, and weather. Agrarian Utopia‘s sociologial-art value is immediately evident because in it there is no division between image and the interest in people. More importantly that interest is broad enough to take on many aspects of daily life, but is also specific enough to isolate what makes life run, what provides drive and the ability to keep functioning. It doesn’t move in any discernible flow; it is a collage, mosaic, and mural all at the same time. It is a film not to be followed, exactly, but to be allowed to settle like a glaze, one whose succession gives a sense both for diurnal activity and irreduceable experience, the small and the infinite as one.

Digital video, while not handling lines in a poetic way, is well-equipped for adequately communicating utter stillness in a way that film does not. A figure moving through the mist resembles a ripple across a flat, solid canvas of moisture. Powerful winds swirl the water. Two boys jump into the mud and hide among the tall grasses. Everything that they do here is tied to nature, mediated by ingenuity. To them it is nature, not a succession of mercurial whims, or even a neutral and unyielding fact. It is equally their own nature, since they are a part of it. Like an earlier film by Raksasad, 2006′s Stories From the North, Agrarian Utopia has a sort of narrative thread (in the other film, it is a series of narrative threads) built from excerpted moments of the lives of ordinary people, marked by candidness and intimacy, its individual scenes seem more applicable to a much longer cord of civilization that goes farther and deeper than stories or documentation. Like cave paintings that tell of the age of the rock, the millenia that lie behind them, it manages to be both timeless and timely.

While Agrarian Utopia studies activity, work, the shape of function, and the many tones of subsistence, few actions take place without human voices. Aside from an extended period in its final third – a storm that occurs during the height of the rice-growing season – the film is full of mealtime conversations, pronouncements, and sleepless musings from the family members. These don’t amount to a unified point, and so the dialogues within are all the more versatile, far-reaching, and human. A rural existence is far from a disconnected one – which we saw when waves of ‘Red Shirts’ marched into Bangkok in 2010, mainly from the countryside and demanding the ousting of Abhisit. Even if, in working the land, the brothers and their families are more separate from society than they had been, they still share many of its dreams and ideals. At one point in the film, Mungmeung ventures into the city and finds himself surrounded by a cacophony of political slogans making promises to help the poor.

Toward the beginning there is a rally for a pro-Thaksin politician whose supporters deliver fiery, electrifying speeches. The one-way politicization depicted here continues on in dialogue between the farmers. The topics are familiar; they want whichever government will make life easier for them, make opportunities available and live up to its promises. Like the lines the politicians deliver, the common people’s concerns abridge what is actually a very complex and encompassing role that the governments have in their lives. We never lose this notion of the feverish activity, the powerful workings of capitalism and politics going on far away, but whose effects filter down. Even in scenes that are stationary, or idyllic, or absorbed in the minutia of work, the struggles continue in the background of our consciousness, even as we watch the people farthest from them, least a part of shaping them, and altogether most affected by them.

While having elections is a vital – if extremely confrontational – issue in Thailand, what does it really matter for the farmers? They see what’s being done to them but do not see independence as a viable course to take. It seems a step back, away from the direction that they’ve been taught, their whole lives, is the correct one.

Talking with their neighbor plants a seed of ambivalence in them – is his outlook better? They wonder. “He’s a crazy fool,” Mungmeung says. “And we’re another kind of crazy fool.” After the friend announces that he has been forced to sell his property, thereby rendering them all landless once again, the neighbor invites them to live on his land. They would not pay rent, and could grow enough to live off of, but they must not use pesticides or artificial fertilizer. It seems too risky, too much like an experiment, although by all accounts the neighbor is doing quite well in his own way. For someone who loves nature and working closely with it, his is truly the life.

What their neighbor describes to them is an interconnected and harmonious system of nature and civilization. He uses animals farm. Wild animals eat what he grows and doesn’t use, and consequently disperse the seeds. “It’s not about the money,” he says, describing his approach to farming. “It’s about the food.” This way of life does not sound dissimilar to the way that the families Jumma and Mungmeung live, but with subsistence becoming a good, even liberating thing. They remain steadfastly focused on upward mobility – freedom from loans, education for their children, a life in the city. Daily experience contradicts these notions, blocking them for striving for anything beyond their concrete, immediate needs.

The utopian experiment taking place next door to them may be an ideal for the way that the rest of the country, even the world, could operate. Beyond rural farming, its tenets could be applied in all manner of settings and on a great many levels. While he is living experiment, he still seems infinitely better off. Perhaps it is his outlook and planning that make him appear this way; after all, as Mungmeung points out, the man is healthy and doesn’t have a family to look after. But his surpluses could support them all. So where is the utopia to which the title is referring? Is it in the neighbor’s life at the present moment, or in the future hopes of the family? The system in which they live imposes on them its version of what their goals should be, and keeps them fixated on those goals, which it renders, by design, impossible.

There is a great deal of change taking place outside the families’ purview. Technology is expanding and intensifying, the political tectonics shifting seemingly by the day, and yet their lifestyle moves more or less at the rate that it has for generations. Which is not to say that it doesn’t evolve in its own way – it does, but far out of step with what happens in the cities. While remaining rooted in its rural setting, the film, through enchanting lyricism and sensitive observation, communicates both the weight of this insuperable disconnect between the two worlds as well as the ways in which they are fundamentally, and often painfully, entwined with one another.

Agrarian Utopia works effectively as a discourse on democracy, and also as an immersive portrait of life as a rural farmer. While on one level, it seems we are seeing scenes from an ancient struggle of people within nature, things feel all the more epic because they are also given a political context, with implications beyond home and field. So many people are fighting to have their voices heard, and so many more, as we see in this film, could not begin to imagine that they have their own voices at all. In a country being confronted with so many disaffected people, the very meaning of a democratic society starts to shift and rumble. The questions take shape: is it a single, definite thing, or does its parameters change depending on the demands of a particular situation? Is it an end to be pursued, even if it cannot provide for everyone? In the tradition of Wang Bing’s Coal Money (2008) and Omar Amiralay’s Everyday Life in a Syrian Village (1974), it contextualizes labor and survival as elements in a continuum of social change and economic systems of repression.

The film is a statement without really making any of its own. Therein lies its power, because rhetoric has the tendency to become calcified in its particular context, becoming an effigy of the ideas it carries rather than a breathing and vital conduit for them. For commentary to be so obvious and necessary, it of course must hinge on real and explicable foundations, the facts that eclipse the words that get tied to them like so wishes to a tree. This film is about contemporary life in Thailand – it doesn’t include anything else. And yet, it taps astutely into ongoing dialogues the world over that will no doubt continue far into the future of humanity.

Directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz

With Lucyna Winnicka, Mieczyslaw Voit, Anna Ciepielewska

A priest lies on the floor, face down, motionless. After a few minutes he rises, having done prostrating himself before god for the moment. Father Suryn does this habitually; perhaps he has had an impure thought, or an impatient urge, or a nagging thought that needed banishment. This meek and pious man has come to this place – it may be a village, a scattered rural settlement, or a vast nothingness – to help the nuns of an isolated convent rid themselves of demonic possession that has caught on among them like a wildfire in the past six months. Their mother superior, Joan (like the Maid of Orléans, or the female pope of legend) is the worst afflicted, as her body acts as a sounding-box for the voices of demons.

At the inn where the father is staying are a mangy group of locals who are not as fearful of what the nuns do in the name of Satan as they are of what the clergy does in the name of god. There is the irrepressibly bawdy innkeeper, the gentle barmaid, the hopeful squire, and the hunch-backed church assistant Kaziuk, who gets to see much of the goings on at the convent. Occasionally there is also one of the nuns, the youthful Margaret, who is apparently the only one without a problem. No, her indiscretions are much more slight, and consist mainly of coming down to the pub to enjoy a bit of alcohol and song. An aristocrat on horseback also appears, around the same time as Suryn’s arrival, with an eye for Margaret

Public displays of possession seem to happen every Sunday for those who show up. Led by Joan, the women show poise, and attract people who want to vicariously enjoy that poise being broken. The nuns play the part that is now expected of them, an impassioned show for an audience; they scream and writhe when the priest sprinkles holy water on them. The priests’ attempts at exorcism seems more like an antagonism, causing Joan to go into a rather gymnastic display of possession but clearly not doing much to help. The men restrain her, she asks god for forgiveness; they are each playing a part that they enjoy. Afterward, Suryn goes to his room and self-flagellates, taking penance for feeling attracted to Joan.

While the other women may be merely cashing in on the collective hysteria, Suryn is convinced that Joan is the real deal. How else could a woman make herself seductive to a man so self-denying? By the time their first face-to-face meeting is through, she has evidently made him fall (how far, it is unclear) because both are in separate corners of the room whipping themselves on their backs.

Suryn, at this point totally doubts his own abilities, goes to a rabbi for guidance, one who subjects the situation to a deeper analysis than the priest likely could. Perhaps it is not the devil – the rabbi points out to him – “but a lack of angels.” In the absence of something positive, they accentuate the negative, creating meaning or purpose of a sort where they had looked and only found a dull void. Satan must be a very busy man, after all, and even with eight incarnations floating around, probably would have neither time nor inclination to possess the head of an isolated convent in such a bleak backwater as this.

The priest, his righteous sense of duty heightened by his setbacks, has the local men construct a wooden grid to stand between Joan and himself. But he is essentially commissioning his own martyrdom, for it is a St. Lawrence’s grill upon which the woman will roast him with her terrifying gaze. He must still want to see her face, otherwise he would have brought in a solid partition. But perhaps he built it to keep himself back, imprisoning the woman in the process – Western morality writ large. Suryn urges her to “be good like a child” and to “be happy like a child,” but she cannot return to that state. Her religion demands that she be good, faithful, and anonymous. “If one can’t be a saint, it’s better to be condemned,” she tells him. She is on a crusade for recognition, good or bad, of her individuality, and this seemed the most obvious avenue in her current situation.

She has found a way for her self-expression to flourish within the strictures of social construct. It is an ingenious way of getting out of having to worship male symbols in a repressive religious environment. As for the men around her, they want to believe in the hocus pocus because otherwise they might have a free-thinking woman on their hands. The condescending pity that other characters have for Joan feels more like a comment on contemporary views of women, rather than medieval ones that would still identify them as the originators of sin.

The song of Antosia, the barmaid, is one of the first sounds that we associate with Suryn when he arrives at the inn, and it recurs throughout the film. At first it sounds like a Diana-song of the lute that accelerates into a chaste dance. However it comes to signify temptation, surrounded by intimations of that particular sin, one to which few of the characters seem disposed. Nonetheless they delight in sitting around at the pub and using innuendos. It is suggested early on that she used to be a nun in the convent. Later we see sitting by the window and staring longingly at the church across a field, as though longing to see iniquity again from the other side. The song, which more or less constitutes the film’s score (along with the ringing of the nuns’ chorus throughout the convent – both being diegetic), by the end has come to sound lugubrious or even hostile, a devil’s lullaby that people play to themselves to help ignore the horror of things they cannot control.

There seems to be this widespread self-delusion over the nature and causes of the women’s behavior. Father Garniec, who was put to death before the story takes place, the people believed to be a sorcerer because of his fraternizing with the women of the convent. His children, presumably born to one of the nuns, are in the care of Father Brym, who bought into the sorcerer story, or at least thought it a convenient reason to burn the man. At the same time, Brym characterizes the women’s chronic possessions as a show of religious histrionics to impress the townspeople. “Perhaps that’s how saints are made,” he remarks to Suryn, painting it all as a theatrical spectacle. The people let their values rest in the comfort of an external duplicity, while at the same time recognizing sleight of hand when it is apparent.

If he sounds rather on the cynical side, Suryn is his antithesis, admitting to not knowing anything about the sins of the world, having virtually grown up in the cloister. None of the other characters is entirely jaded (most are sarcastic or darkly comedic) and so none provides an adequate counterweight to his pure naiveté, making him seem all the more imbalanced and solitary as a result.

The perpetual tonic throughout the scenes is unease, felt at a nearly subliminal level. The camera rarely stays stationary, with an unstable line of vision that notches down or up as characters move to change where they are situated. Images are composed piecemeal, usually within a single shot, with sudden pans down to a character’s hands or with a previously unseen figure swaying into the frame. The camera seems attracted to motifs of blankness (such as the back of a nun’s white habit as she faces away) only to subvert those spaces by opening a fault line of expression (such as when she turn her face to look in our direction). A dry landscape is sure to be cut through by a passing traveler, gliding across the desolate frame.

It is precisely the film’s complete wading-in of its more generic materials, not to mention encompassing starkness, that make it a roaring success. Because it can navigate with standard-issue religious images, particularly that which at first blush seems dreadfully static, Mother Joan of the Angels finds power in familiarity, much more than if it were an all-out desecration of convention. It achieves its alteration by way of light and energy – light to bring solidity to iconography, and to hollow out poignantly vast spaces; energy to animate the pallid faces. As a result, the allegorically flat terrain that it traverses acquires a real form that feels independent of expectancy and reasoning. People’s various subtleties help them emerge as psychologically complex while at the same time filling the positions of caricatures.

Certainly there are moments that seem overburdened (and thus transfer that feeling to the audience): matching reaction shots of Suryn’s face and then the rabbi’s (both characters played by the same actor – the rabbi symbolizing a rational side to the priest’s conscience), the fallen nun Margaret’s hysterical response to having been seduced and abandoned. But these weak points are fleeting, never long or horrendous enough to lose the film its footing.

Throughout the strictly nominal examination of morality, the film actually has none, and is free to take ruinous veers into thorny reaches or merely bask in delicious suggestiveness. Like the appearance of the nuns, it cultivates itself as an exercise in rigor – overpowering geometry, pure celluloid, total contrasts, etc. – lean and focused, but belies itself through its every motion, and is in a way possessed, its unlawful qualities masked by a foundation of powdered perfection. Transubstantiating rather than transgressing orthodoxy, and with deference to Dreyer, director Kawalerowicz fashions an inimitable cinematic experience that manages a complexity of philosophies while still supporting the great, bulbous mass of western religious symbolism. At bottom a valorization of individuality, it is also a horror story of the deformations that individuality can take on under tight repression, refusing to stay lidded. In other words: religion is one of the targets, but surely can’t be the only one.

The priests at the monastery have the church bells ring every day, giving hope to  wanderers who are outside in the surrounding wilderness. This way the priests can announce themselves, and announce that their way is right. But why do men keep church bells sounding day and night? While it is because of their fear of god, more specifically, they fear the evil on Earth that god created – that which is unknown outside of them, and possibly within as well. Like the pan-pipes or the lute, the bells are a form of music in the darkness, a way of fending off darkness and all that one is unwilling to contemplate. A creature like Suryn, who believes that he carries all the light he needs within him, is all the more surprised, fearful, even destructive, when he realizes his will is not ironclad. Eschewing emotion, believing in nothing but god, he has not the necessary barriers that most mortals have to keep corruption from their hearts. Freedom is more frightening for him than for anyone who inhabits earthly squalor.

Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

With Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Chen Songyong, Xin Shufen

A City of Sadness takes place in the time between Japan’s ceding of Taiwan and the nationalist Chinese government occupying the island as its last stronghold. In this transitory moment, marked by rapid changes in policy and law, the country was passed from one colonizing force to another, standing on the brink of being captured by yet another. An already uncertain climate is perhaps most uncertain for the  Japanese families still living there, many of whom have lived their whole lives in Taiwan, the ground of their adopted homeland about to be pulled out from under their feet, leaving ocean in its place. They can allow themselves to be deported or to stay on and keep living their lives, in doing so subjecting themselves to violent mobs of Taiwanese and possibly being labeled “collaborators” by the government (although the heavy hand of the Japanese government left little room for non-collaborators for the fifty or so years that they were there). Director Hou Hsiao-Hsien draws on the ambivalence of this period, mapping it out across a varied group of characters whose hopes and losses are spelled by sparse dialogue and action, but are nonetheless articulately and profoundly realized.

The film opens in the gloom of a power outage. The wife of Wen-Heung, the eldest of four brothers of a well-to-do Taiwanese family, is in the throes of labor. A radio broadcast announces Japan’s defeat, and Wen-Heung’s son, who is named Kang-Ming (which, as onscreen text tells us, means light) is born as the lamps flicker back on. Gradually we get to know the Lin clan, who occupy a stately home built on the money of petty ventures and organized crime. Far from this largesse is the youngest brother, Wen-Ching, who works as a photographer. Hinomi and Hinoe, a sister and brother from a Japanese family, are his best friends, and he keenly feels the discrimination that they now suffer with the changing times. While Wen-Ching is completely deaf, he can communicate with people through writing and tracing out characters with a finger to the hand, and his two Japanese friends are the ones who are most attuned to him.

Hinomi has just gotten a job as a nurse at a miner’s hospital high up in the mountains. Most of the staff there are Japanese, and many of them are desperately trying to learn Mandarin to better accommodate the influx of Chinese patients. Her brother Hinoe’s group of friends, a mixed crowd of journalists and mainland intellectuals, spend much of their time talking left-wing politics and the overthrow of the Kuomintang. While Wen-Ching, being deaf and unable to talk, cannot engage them dialectically, he absorbs their rhetoric through their company and literature, gradually evolving a desire for revolution, as well as loving feelings for Hinomi. Like so many of his emotions, he does not make the latter explicit, perhaps out of respect for his equal friendship with Hinoe, but they are evident from his behavior towards the young woman.

Wen-Heung and Wen-Ching’s two middle brothers have been gone a long time fighting in the war. One of them is missing in the Philippines and presumed dead. The other, Wen-Leung, materializes again, apparently having suffered a nervous breakdown on the Chinese mainland, and is so violent and irrational that he must be kept strapped to his bed. In one scene he attacks Hinomi and Wen-Heung, who are trying to help him, before being sedated. While Wen-Heung has harbored high ideals for the continuation of his family’s dynasty, his brothers have brought, variously, disappointment and tragedy. He himself is given to gambling and carousing, and thus cannot hope to stay afloat in a time of such drastically shifting loyalties. Their father, a gently decrepit man who spends much of the film smoking and watching people flit and thunder past, seems beyond the anxiety and precariousness of the family’s status, a lifetime of conflict giving way to tacit reflection.

Throughout this initial period Hinoe and Hinomi are losing friends to deportation. Japanese imperialism has been reversed, virtually overnight, and as usual, the toll on ordinary citizens of both ethnicities is seen everywhere. Shizuko, the sister of Hinoe’s friend gives Hiromi keepsakes before leaving for Japan, giving up the connection with identity and homeland that she had in Taiwan. There is a sense that she no longer need ancestral objects to feel Japanese, since she is going there. Interestingly the gift is a sword, seen by the two of them as an object inimitably Japanese, but also one that signifies its martial presence, one that has been softened and pushed aside. Now it could serve better as a weapon in revolution, implementation to replace ornamentation. At meals Hinoe and his friends talk about how life is different, the rising price of rice, unemployment, police brutality. Wen-Ching and Hinomi do not engage in the conversation but sit by the gramophone together – this is their communion with one another. Their relationship relies heavily on writing back and forth to one another, revealing aspects about how they each see the world.

Riots cause Taiwan to go under martial law, and Wen-Ching is nearly attacked because he is mistake for Japanese. Hinoe, who seems to go undetected, comes to his aid. People pour into the mountain hospital to take refuge from violence. Messages on the radio urge people not to be suspicious of their neighbors (while at the same time the police seek the collaborators), superficially trying to disown the violence that erupts throughout the island while in fact condoning and even funding it. The matter of who is a collaborator are complex – after all this used to be Japan.

Wen-Leung returns to mental health, at least on the surface, and, having some of the family’s boats at his disposal, quickly gets tempted by a group of mainland gangsters into helping them smuggle rice and sugar out of Taiwan. Meanwhile the prices for such common foods have become astronomical since the war began. With Japan ousted from Taiwan, a new sort of shadow-capitalism from China is able to move freely, marginalizing local big men such as Wen-Heung and his father. At the start of the film, the night-club that the father owns, formerly shut down during colonial times, has been re-opened as the “Shanghai Club.” Clearly they are not above kowtowing to the opportunists who have flooded in, as long as it means holding onto their old property.

It takes little time for Wen-Heung to discover, through a mistake of his artless crony (and Wen-Leung collaborator) Ah-Ga, of the smuggling racket, and he puts a stop to it, reproaching his brother and sparking a feud with the shady, malevolent mainlanders. While he and his group are really no better than those criminals, we feel for his loss of power and pride, which goes even to the point where his younger brother is engaging in dealings behind his back. Their elderly father chides Wen-Leung, explaining that, when he was a young man, he rebelled against the Japanese, not his own people. By aiding and abetting exploitation from China, Wen-Leung is, in effect, lashing out at those around him.

An enemy denounces Wen-Leung and he gets hauled off to prison. A victim of his self-interest, he is also suffering for the excesses of new capitalism. There is a scene wherein Wen-Heung tries to strike a deal with the Shanghai men to help free his brother. He speaks through Ah-Ga, who translates the Taiwanese Mandarin into Cantonese, which one of the gangsters then translates into Shanghainese for the rest to hear. Without there help, Wen-Leung appears at his father’s doorstep once again, beaten and bloodied by the police. He relapses into shell-shock once again. This vacillation out of and then back into reality seems little more than opportunism, a hiding from responsibility and consequence, but it is Wen-Heung who has to answer for his infractions.

The conflict between the two contingents (Wen-Heung’s people and the Shanghai mobsters) continues to simmer. His associate, Red Monkey, has been killed by Kim Tsua, a friend of Wen-Leung’s, over a deal involving Japanese currency. Wen-Heung requests a return of the money while friends of his try to mediate talks that will make amends. But his pride is much larger than his influence, and his chosen foes are too powerful to care much about how angry he is. This family, who must have previously felt untouchable for so long, are now subject to the whims of the government, and are all the more exposed for their prosperity and prominence. One by one each of the brothers disappears for a spell, thrown into silence and uncertainty in prison.

A short time after his arrest Wen-Ching is freed and returns home. If there was any trepedation in his mind that Chang Kai Shek and his government should be resisted at all costs, jail time has erased that. He learns that Hinoe is living up in the mountains where he is hiding out with other Japanese dissidents to escape persecution. He becomes a go-between for Hinoe and Hinomi, who cannot learn of her brother’s whereabouts. Wounded in an incident with angry locals, Hinoe takes shelter at his parents’ house, where people of Japanese descent speak Mandarin. He poses a problem for the: Hinoe cannot simply behave himself and conform, instead incurring for his family dishonor, suspicion, and the possibility of arrest.

Hou uses language as a means to convey the complexity of the colonized situation, and the disenfranchisement at its core. Being situated at a remove from the strictures and divisions of language, Wen-Ching is, concurrently at the center of the film’s visual sensibility, being the purveyor of portraiture, its most salient motif. He functions as the recorder of history or, at least, the surfaces thereof. Wen-Ching communicates through tracing characters on his palm, so he has the written language, the commonality between the dialects of China and Taiwan, as well as Japanese. It is significant that the linguistic barriers are diminished or different from his perspective even though he is isolated by deafness. The choice of making the character deaf arose because Tony Leung, the Hong Kong actor who plays him, was not well suited to the Taiwanese dialogue – a choice that adds yet another dimension to the film’s linguistic dynamics.

As much emphasis as there is on speech as a metaphorical signifier of human connection – as well as the severing of connection, when it is manifested in disenfranchisement and hegemony – Hou will at times eschew it altogether, showing events or establishing chronology with brief scenes that have no dialogue but rely on the visual. We are reminded of the visual (textual/Chinese) way that Wen-Ching relates to the world, assimilates and understands things. Wen-Heung is a character who has no time for writing (and possibly may never have mastered it completely) and so verbally berates his deaf brother. Wen-Ching’s scenes are at such a remove from the trials of his family – none of them really has the sensitivity to match his own, and it seems as though he lives in another world altogether. Not surprisingly, Wen-Ching reveals that his role model, when he was a child (and before an accident rendered him deaf), was a lithe and graceful opera performer. It would not be a stretch to posit that Wen-Heung’s role model was their father, a club owner and small-time gangster who has had problems with alcoholism.

The film’s outsized ambition is felt in Hou’s fluctuation between the extensive and the minute, the historical and the slice-of-life, the dramatic and the domestic, the contemplative with the violent, giving a varied sense for the major events that stream into everyday life and sometimes deluge it. His exhaustive take on things is forever echoed in the smallest details; wide establishing shots of landscapes (where mountains tumble dramatically to the sea) lead us briskly to the bustling scenes in the family home, and the feeling of an epic scale is not diminished, only moved slightly. With such an intimate sense for his material, the setting and the people in A City of Sadness, Hou has these seemingly opposing elements co-exist and never forestall one another. It’s appropriate that, in a film concerned with language and its implications, one of the chief contrapositions is between the actually quite verbal, and almost literary, scenes between Wen-Ching, Hiromi, and Hinoe (language taking on several shifting forms with them) and the decidedly nonverbal scenes with the other two brothers – marked by Wen-Leung’s pensive silences (or violent seizures… they alternate) and Wen-Heung’s strangely pre-linguistic outbursts at people – where looks and unconcious gestures are emphasized. Contrasting scenes with Wen-Heung and his newborn baby have a quiet, paternal tenderness.

Part of what keeps the film from ballooning into pure histrionics is that it feels so contained – in spite of its large and effortless scope – both in terms of compositions (so many interactions seen through framing interiors, their windows, screens, and thresholds), and in terms of character, concerning itself mainly with one family and their environs. Hou films people through defining enclosures with very deliberate geometry, spaces divided and subdivided by deep focus into adjoining rooms. The frontal, finely-layered interior imagery (with a palpably confined feeling that Hou’s films share with those of Edward Yang) gives more power to the empty boundlessness of the exterior shots. What happens onscreen is so often enriched with off-camera voices and cross-camera motion, drawing events in ever deeper, ever closer to the particulars of the environment. Long, single-takes with many characters are filmed from a perspective that is set back from the action, giving life to portraiture, presenting concerts of people, activity, and wild sound. These scenes, alive with activity and chaotic naturalism, are balanced by a seemingly equal number of spartan, scrupulously-poised stagings, both types with their own, distinct emotional impact.

Meanwhile the theme music – a march-like anthem of longing that seems to fade into the air – appears whenever characters make the slow and silent trudge up the road into the mountains. It heightens the feeling that they are ascending to heaven, only to be continually wrenched away from it by the events on the ground. The exterior shots on the mountain, paired with the score, serve to conjure narrative propulsion by emphasizing an ascending/descending motion, and also to tear away the walls of the historical moment to reveal an ancient Taiwan that still thrives into the present day. This visible link to the past is palpably connected to the hope and comradeship of the hospital, and both are places whose humanity defies nationality.

As in so much of his work, Hou is more intent on tracing paths of human tragedy through textures and tones, rather than events and dramatic fulcra. One can look back at the contours of the story with little difficulty, but they seem arrayed in a jumble with no center. It’s not that they aren’t important, but ultimately, their aggregate composition – which is to say, the story they form – is not as important to conjuring the history, the political climate, and the human landscape of what was a pivotal moment for modern Taiwan. Hou is sure to swathe each scene with layers of historical details, but all of a very ordinary sort, never allowing them to become stretched thin by style or lit wanly by aura. Each motion feels that it has the weight of a lifetime resting on it (as well as those of preceding generations), and each setting has a lived-in quality that cannot be achieved by mere visual cues to the past.

Like in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, we see the horror and tumult of a changing world by way of mostly very privileged characters. Nonetheless they have had their share of suffering and loss, and their descent into ignominy has been a long time in the making. The film seems to take a similar position to Lampedusa’s novel in positing that the decline is all the more precipitous the higher up you started. The antithesis of the entrenched Lin clan are the farmers working with water buffalo on their rice paddy, their lives unchanging even with the winds of change veering this way and that. Hou also seems to be paralleling the experience of Japanese and Taiwanese in the country at that time. Both are being forced, in some ways, to give up the land they have known their whole lives – one literally, and the other figuratively, as the place transforms around them.

Photography loses its priority with Wen-Ching as he is pulled closer to Hinoe’s ideals and to Hinomi’s heart. While initially his profession also felt like his main connection with the world, language and feelings needing to be rendered visually for him, the very falseness of happiness has become more apparent to him with each passing day. He is sensible to cries of pain even if they are inaudible to him, his sensitivities trapped with fewer and fewer outlets. Hinomi, now more than a focus for his affection, becomes the axis upon which his feelings for the world around him must pivot. She represents the idealized past for him, and is, at the same time, the scant light of tomorrow. He sets up the camera. He and Hinomi pose for a portrait in front of a mural of a Western-style living room, threadbare optimism hanging behind them as a backdrop. While the return of electricity at the start of the film seems to represent a new dawn for Taiwan, the colonizing forces leaving and the war at a close, it is in fact a trick of the light, the mirage of hope, sustaining long enough to show the dimensions of the decayed surroundings, only to coldly plunge them back into darkness.

Directed by Sarah Maldoror

With Elisa Andrade, Domingos de Oliveira, Jean M’Vondo

The raging river dashes itself against the yellow sand, while a team of laborers harvests great big rocks from the shore, breaking them down to manageable size to carry them off to be used as building material. The beach is at once an elemental place and one of constant foment, this idea driven home as the camera moves from the water to the workers. In the modern world, they are the human element, and also the last frontier in revolutionary possibility. If they can break enormous stones with only their hands and a stone tool, what keeps them from breaking the chains that keep them bound? Alongside the men working only with their bodies is Domingos, a hulking young Angolan driving a tractor to haul yet more rocks. The white foreman, Mr. Sylvester, seems to have a close relationship with Domingos, to the slight befuddlement of Timoteo, a young recruit to the team whose instinct is to be suspicious of the Portuguese.

Domingos returns home to the worker’s colony where he lives, still dressed in his jumpsuit. He kicks a soccer ball with the local children, carries his baby son, and then eats supper with his wife, Maria. Why is he late in coming home? He has been talking with Timoteo, bringing the young man into the fold of the revolutionary worker’s organization of which he is already member. Domingos receives pamphlets from nationalist revolutionaries in Luanda, and gives them to Timoteo to hand out among the other workers.

All is peaceful in the hut. Director Sarah Maldoror expresses the poetry of bodies at rest through Maria and Domingos lying in bed – both half-clothed, along with their baby – he exhausted after a day of construction, she after a day of domestic labor, both of them smooth and muscular in a very work-worn, but still youthful, way. The police show up at their camp and quickly raid the hut, pulling a struggling Domingos outside. There are four carrying him, one man for each of his mighty limbs, and they tie him up with rope and throw him into a truck, which speeds away down the road. For no reason, no explanation, the man is gone.

The neighbors gather inside Maria’s hut to comfort her, and the atmosphere is still, silent, almost funereal, giving a finality to what has happened. Meanwhile in the back of the truck, Domingos screams and raves, lashing out against his captors. Here he resembles a captured slave, bound and bestial in a reduced state of violence. Maria’s neighbor tells her to go and make a scene at the local administrative office – to illicit their pity so they will tell him of her whereabouts. She is a woman who cannot start petitions, is not meant to raise outcry, is meant to suffer with dignity, and thus has limited means of challenging the injustice of her husband’s arrest. No savings, no transportation, no real allies – she has her son, two feet, and a voice.

As he is dragged into police headquarters, the neighborhood people look on, including a young boy named Zito. He runs to tell his grandfather, and the two of them leave the shelter of their slum for the tall buildings of the city center to look for the old man’s godson, Chico. They relate the story to Chico, how the young boy saw a man being hauled into the museke (neighborhood) prison, and put him on the case of trying to identify the captive. This seems to be the people’s usual protocol (a street-level version of intelligence-gathering) for all the political prisoners that find their way into the prison. That Domingos has been taken from his hometown in Dondo, 150 miles away, to the capital city, Luanda, suggests that the central government has an interest in his interrogation. For those in the nationalist movement, so far mainly operating in secret, this could strike a huge blow; if tortured, the man might name names.

Maria sets off, encouraged and supplied with provisions by her neighbors, to find Domingos. She walks slowly, with downcast eyes, to where the dirt road meets the pavement, and continues to the nearest city. Far from being repressed by the situation, she takes on a grim strength she may not have been aware existed. A woman’s plaintive, unaccompanied song is heard on the soundtrack as Maria trudges through tall grass, slow, determined, with more than just the weight of her child riding on her back. She carries the hope for future generations, something already pregnant with expectation even before the first arms have been taken up against the oppressors. Her war foreshadows that which her country would engage in for more than a decade, and it predates her life, being already generations old at that point.

Chico tracks down his old friend Miguel, a fellow revolutionary under the tutelage of a man named Mussunda. He takes Miguel aside to the shoreline, a favored meeting spot where the noise of the breakers precludes being spied on or overheard. Miguel then goes to Mussunda, who works as a tailor while engaging young socialists in dialectical talk. Mussunda, as one of the figureheads of the movement is understandably nervous about Salazar’s PIDE agents descending upon him, and so must keep a low profile and his associations shrouded in secret. For him it is most urgent that they know who the burly prisoner is, to assess if he might point them out to the authorities. So while Maria is trying to discover the location of Domingos, the MPLA people are trying to discover his name.

Domingos, still shirtless from when he was kidnapped, stands before two police officers, his face cut and swollen. To get him to cooperate, he is told that Maria is waiting for him outside. He maintains his resilience by denying everything. The mulatto chief plays the good cop, while the white officer plays the brutalizer. When Domingos refuses to talk he is beaten severely. He is of little consequence to them; they really want to know the name of the white man who helps their anticolonial activities.

Maria finds her way to the district administrator’s office, and tells her plight to the man in charge. He responds that Domingos was a bandit, and that his arrest was entirely justified. She stages a breakdown, out of frustration and anger, repeating a wail for her husband like a ceremonial dirge. A man working as a guard at the administrative office, whom she knows, sends her on a bus to Luanda, revealing to her that her husband has been taken there. So she continues into even more unfamiliar territory, driven to locate him. But there is no thought to what she will do when she knows where he is. She resembles a long-colonized people pushing their way toward independence – they only know that they need to have it, not what they will do once they have located it. To know him again – even if it is in the form of bad news, an end to their life together – is what she intends to have. The other resistance fighters seem more convinced that he is a lost cause, and want to protect themselves and Domingos’ other compatriots from a similar fate.

The bright, circular patterns of her village dress stand out among the dull ordinariness of the city. In the middle of the night she arrives at the house of an acquaintance, Mrs. Tete, and is immediately given shelter, her baby breastfed by another woman. In the morning she goes to the police station nearby. It is a sleepy, hopeless place, and she is directed to the city police a few blocks away. And so it goes: she bounces from one station to another, led by a small boy, and she variously gets shooed away or curtly brushed off. Each time we see her expression drop lower, her outrage increase. The innermost prison will never be reachable to her, because that is how they were designed. But naive possibility keeps her going from one place to the next. The silence and solitude of her rambling quest is intercut with images of Domingos deep within the prison walls, circling the yard wordlessly with the other prisoners. Although they are separated, the wife and the husband both walk continuously, uncertain but whirling with thoughts.

Maldoror focuses on the very personal struggle of Maria, while keeping the parallel chains of events as a framing outline. While she doesn’t spend the greatest length of time with Maria, she holds her ordeal as equal in importance to the other narrative strands. That sensitivity to the woman’s plight provides a contrasting light to Mussunda’s apparent callousness. While Domingos’ disappearance is a momentary loss for the construction crew and the resistance movement, they have to move forward. For Maria the trauma is permanent, and her story is lost on them in the face of the broader picture. For the spectator it initially feels as though his death has been for naught. But then Maldoror provides us with this hope: Domingos’ plight will go on to radicalize the people whom he knew, as well as those whom he did not know, adding fuel to the armed struggle against the Portuguese colonial authorities that still had yet to begin. The film ends with men meeting in secret, on the rocks among the crashing waves, setting their sights on February 4^th, conceiving the battle for independence that would still be going on while the film was being made, more than ten years after the time in which the novel is set.

The disappearance, interrogation, and torture of Domingos becomes a struggle visible in the consciousness of the public, although the authorities have done their best to keep it hidden away from view. He has friends in the ranks of the prison guards (a secret note from Timoteo makes its way into his water cup) and in those outside in the movement. News about him spreads by word of mouth, and people work (in secret, by necessity) to raise awareness of it. Maria’s plight, meanwhile, takes place in the outside world, but gets largely ignored. While it is half of the reality, equally tortured and hopeless as that of the imprisoned man, the sight of it is too commonplace, too feminine and far from heroic. But she is the most completely-formed hero that the story has – more so than her martyred husband, the tireless revolutionary workers, or the Mussunda, a central teacher of the movement. While they seem more like blocks in the piecemeal construction of a revolution, she is engaged in a struggle that seems endless, and fought through varying settings – war, work, migration. She is something greater than the sundered family unit, a living embodiment of the oppression through which the exploited suffer, and also their tenacity, their clinging to life.

While Sambizanga unflinchingly looks at the fate of revolutionaries who are “disappeared” by the state, at the same time, it remains far too attuned to what the wife and child are experiencing to represent them as flip symbols or tragic figurines. Maria is transforming throughout her journey, and continues to struggle even after there is no more hope left. Although she is not, herself, a member of the liberation movement, she is the most representative of their ideals; she continues to fight, even in total darkness. The fight is what keeps her going, not the thought of winning out. While the overall goal of expelling the Portuguese from Angola (as well as capitalism, colonialism – the whole mess) certainly never dimmed throughout the nationalist fight for independence, how many thousands fought in the dark, sacrificed themselves, or persisted without hope? In any mass movement there are individual darknesses, some of which recede with the dawn, but many of which are not lived through to get to that point.

The narrative is built around the reactions of the community, the way they share knowledge and understanding, through which revolution is gradually awakened. At the end of the story, one feels as though it is the common villagers, the uneducated laborers and elderly women of the slums, who have the most revolutionary potential, because they are the most imprisoned, and that they are the backbone of any movement towards greater freedom. The jaded ideologues among them are the intellectual lining to a wider and more comprehensive consciousness, the strategists, the ones who can make sense of what the bosses are trying to do. But ultimately, they don’t represent the populace, even though they are destined to become their leaders – or, more accurately, to undergo a transformation from being leaders to being bosses themselves.

That the filmmaker can retain the powerful urgency that surrounds the film, both within its frame and outside, in the besieged climate in which it was made, while not losing an ounce of the sensitivity in her storytelling that follows Maria and her child with intimacy and empathy. Parallel to her and the baby, gradually being run ragged by their ordeal, is the touching connection between the boy and his grandfather, as well as the genuine efforts they make to save Domingos. They are the most dedicated, it feels, and they are also the most individually powerless characters. As we progress up the hierarchy of influence, the ones who have the most of it seem the least interested in helping, seen in the underwhelming reaction given by the local leader of the movement, and progressing up to the Angolans who work as guards, the ones who mean well but will side with the bosses because of fear and in the interest of self-preservation.

Maldoror is a living legend of bringing post-colonial storytelling into cinema, and Sambizanga is equally legendary, most of all for the auspices under which it was made. Unable to shoot the film in Angola, Maldoror, along with her husband Mário de Andrade (the screenwriter of the film) found locations in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, and, with a motley cast of nonprofessional actors from different parts of Lusophone Africa, made Sambizanga in seven weeks. It was funded by the governments of Congo and France, as well as by the MPLA itself. Knowing that it would never be shown within Angola, the filmmakers intended it more to mobilize audiences in Europe and other parts of Africa, to awaken them to the situation still in progress there.

Nearly every scene of the film seethes with the sights and sounds of the bustling, working-class neighborhood of the title, the scrappy, homemade guitar a child plays; the neighbors idly gossiping with one another; the boys engaged in play-wars. While not a frame of it is actually from Luanda, the locations seem more than adequate for the layered portrait of life the director is trying to create. Maldoror spends a lot of time just looking at people engaged in ordinary activities. They constitute the scenery, for the most part. The narrative maintains Maria’s odyssey as its central artery but, much like the winding lanes of the neighborhood, is not too focused to take us on numerous miniature detours, such as Chico’s budding relationship with a young woman named Bebiana, a neighborhood barbecue where people dance and nosh, or fruit-pickers enumerating the price increases of bananas and manioc. These convincingly unaffected glimpses into everyday life show happiness and idealism mixing with regular, sober survival, and how these things coexist with fear and repression in the air, since they never really go away entirely.

The film is based on the novel The Real Life of Domingos Xavier, by José Luandino Vieira, which was published in the early 60′s. The author had no input on the writing or direction of Sambizanga because he was serving a prison sentence at the time. It would seem that Maldoror shifted the story’s focus more to examine Maria and also, evidently, to Domingos himself, and the pathos of his experience in prison. Both work to great effect. The atmosphere of the film is, as Josef Gugler points out, more redolent of its own time than that of the novel. By 1972 discourses of independence were more fully-formed and liberation ballads floated in the air, much like they do on the soundtrack. The film is more about the human face of Angola’s freedom fight than it is about colonial brutality itself, although there is enough of that seen as well. And even more than being about the people behind the movement, it examines the very real and personal effect of oppression, which takes its toll on a person without regard to his or her level of consciousness or commitment.

While the film is known as a seminal artifact of the Angolan liberation struggle, Maldoror’s intention was not to create an outspoken polemic. And indeed, the film isn’t weighed down by a great deal of direct political statements. Rather, it is a humanist drama that is not at all softened in thematic and aesthetic concerns, but much of whose strength lies in its documentary ingredients. Exceedingly low on production values, the remainder of its efficacy is provided by a powerful story, a faithfulness to what was going on in Angola, and a wide-ranging applicability to people’s movements all around the globe, both in the colonial era (whose death knell it rang proudly) and the post-colonial age (that it signaled lyrically). Like the river’s waters foaming on the shoreline, the laborers, the strategists, old men and children, the stoic women and their feminine support network, are all brought forth and meet at the same front. The struggle takes place on a multitude of levels, and while some of the waves break, there are more behind them that rise up to wash over the rocks.

Directed by Marcel Carné

With Michel Simon, Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault

Inside and away from a bustling London street, the puritanically scary Archibald Soper, Bishop of Bedford, crusader for family values, stands at a podium delivering an impassioned speech denouncing the “immoral” crime novels so popular in England at the turn of the 20th Century. Current target of his ire is one Felix Chapel, a notorious trash writer whom no one has met, existing only by way of his pen. Soper calls such books as Chapel writes “wretched and vile” not because they are poorly written, of course, but because they put bad ideas into the minds of the public. As is often the case with such symposia, the seats are mostly empty, with only a few filled by a scattering of lone crazies, nodding cronies, and stuffy temperance ladies. The Bishop’s cousin, the famed botanist Irwin Molyneux, sheepishly enters the room and hesitantly takes a seat.

While trying to exhort audience members to give testimonials, Soper gets his thunder stolen by the outburst of a young man, William Kramps, a wanted killer who blames Chapel’s novels for his crimes. He loudly vows vengeance on the unknown author before being chased from the room by poorly-disguised undercover policemen. Kramps is an outspoken animal lover who kills butchers, exacting what he sees as a sort of poetic justice on them. The scabrous author wanted by reformers and lunatics alike is in fact the low-key Molyneux, a tiresome loaf by day who secretly works at home cranking out cheap quickie novels to earn extra money for his hard-up household. His brush with Kramps rattles the poor fellow, as the last thing he would want is to be made to suffer for his art. Even worse than indirectly receiving death threats, Soper has announced that he will be coming round to join Molyneux and his wife Margaret for dinner that very night, and is expecting the wonderful duck with orange that is the specialty of their cook.

The bored cook and butler seem to live for the daily visits of the milkman, Billy, who satiates their eagerness with bawdy stories, told with gothic detail, not unlike the sort of material found in Felix Chapel books. Molyneux’s live-in secretary, a young woman named Eva, awaits the milkman for a different reason, and joins the help in the scullery whenever he shows up, although she coolly deflects his aggressive proclamations of love. Margaret upbraids the four of them for being too wrapped up in stories to perform their jobs, and the cook and butler waste no time in quitting, off to look for a more stimulating work environment.

Margaret, mortified at the prospect of having Soper over that evening, concocts a scheme wherein Molyneux will tell his cousin that she has left town to visit friends. Meanwhile she will stay in the background and prepare dinner, while Eva will pose as their servant. This way Soper will not find out that their help have left, and not be equipped to spread gossip that will cause her to lose social status. While he is over, the demanding and glutenous cousin questions Molyneux as to the whereabouts of his wife. As the botanist bumbles through the lie, Soper, his mind contaminated with trashy crime stories, becomes convinced that the man is trying to hide the fact that he has done away with his wife to be with this younger woman. He then announces that he will be spending the night, to find out if Margaret will return.

Panicked, the Molyneuxs both flee the premises, holing up in a hotel in a seedy neighborhood until the fiery bishop has vacated their house. His imagination now going full throttle, Soper calls the police, who arrive, followed closely by scandal sheet journalists, to investigate the apparent murder of Madame Molyneux and the absconding of her husband. So here we have the set-up, which is to say, a situation that is more an array of chaotic threads that will become more and more interwoven through fate, coincidence, and contrived momentum. In the spinning top of intrigue that Soper has set into motion, each unwitting character has been supplanted by a counterpart of heightened drama. Poor old Molyneux finds himself demonized by newspapers, gossiping crowds, even the song of a beggar woman walking down his street.

As enamored of mad spectacle as Children of Paradise (1946) is, Drôle de Drame takes exaggeration in a more dedicated, more distorted direction. The bohemian dandy gets styled into a nonthreatening murderer and amateur Lothario, the drawing-room scientist habitually catches flies to feed to his carnivorous plants, and the crazed soapboxer lives a sad spiral of hypocrisy. The romance, nostalgia, and pretentious morality that the film reaps from comedies of manners are all kept at a rolling boil, rather than being dropped headlong into the flames of dark cynicism.

The question persists: why is a film that so pointedly lambasts various echelons of French society after the great war set in a different time and place? Why retain the setting of Edwardian England? For one thing, this altogether sidesteps the more depressing realities of France at the time that it was made, keeping the comedy pure and simple. It is possible that satire is at its most effective when it its creators draw it away from its immediate surroundings. But more importantly, in doing so here, they are broadening its scope to incorporate much more than is already inherent in its gags, much more than issues that could be deemed contemporary. Also, its preference for a palpable humor, arising from the atmosphere of a particular situation (be it flagrant vapidity or mounting discomfort) is decidedly British in hue, and unlike much of the low, physical French comedy of the day. Avoiding the sensitivity of a Sacha Guitry comedy, its untrimmed edges anticipate the delights of elements of later Ealing pictures. No surface remains without barbs; high, middle, and low-brow each get disabused, often all of them within the space of one line, look, or gesture. The performances are just as guilty of this as the framing and the script. In refusing to inhabit one territory alone, the film drives molehills into every available one of them.

Glee, hunger, young love and hero worship (the latter two somewhat clammily inverted) all contribute to the pudding, wrapping the content in exceedingly basic dialogue and decidedly complex humor. The only possibly important thing left out of firing range is art itself, something that screenwriter Jacques Prévert clearly understood the comedy audience too well to include (but not well enough to make Drôle de Drame a hit, as it turned out; the film’s ambitions evidently proved a bit too much to fully digest at the time of its release). The tropes of the ‘penny dreadful’ are shaken out and used up, almost cruelly, to their scant dregs. Even Molyneux doesn’t seem to know or care much about what he writes, and readily admits that he was given the ideas for his stories by Eva, who admits that she got them from the milkman – the upcycling of popular myth.

The people in the film are fixated on stories to the point where they yearn, in all earnestness, to live them, and without once considering the absurdity or profound indecency of that. Hilariously, the character most stuck in this dreamworld is the Bishop, who creates his own detective narrative out of a mere social fiasco, and whose vocabulary seems entirely composed of unwieldy caricatures. This is not a privileged jab at what the masses consider drama and comedy (to them those things are as serious and meaningful as can be) but a lucid examination of how the supposed cornerstones of a society (religious men, policemen, men of science, etc.) routinely become déclassé themselves by way of their own haplessness, the very stuff of the trash novels that depict them. This fin de siècle London is no intellectual’s paradise. Literature is simultaneously despised and held up as a cultural barometer, its vagaries taken seriously by all camps, here to an almost dystopian degree. The film incorporates lower class stereotypes of high culture and upper class stereotypes of low culture with equal profundity, mixing and matching them endlessly. While it could be thought of, all in all, as only mirroring an intellectual’s condescending images of escapist fiction and yellow journalism, its slapstick is wreathed in pain and its hackneyed motions are held aloft on an inexhaustible waft of self-assurance. Beneath obviousness and contrivance is an undercurrent of cathartic eschewing of the philistinism that thrives on hysteria and being scandalized.

The story plays loud and loose with melodrama fodder, making itself contiguous with, but distinctly post-hoc to (and well beyond the limits of), the very broadly-categorized “poetic realism” of the 1930′s, into which Carné and Prévert’s first collaboration (this film was their second) Jenny (1936) is often placed. The three male leads define the varying shades of insanity that prevail: Barrault arrives via the hammed-up aloofness of the theatre, Simon the snarky emoting of silent comedies. Jouvet is the only one who seems invented for the film, his every eyebrow-raise and facial elongation dancing along with the parps of Maurice Jaubert’s tiptoeing score. It is a relief to realize that Simon was not, in fact, as frail as his character appears (so immersed is the performance), when he winds up doing drunken pratfalls, thereby proving the opposite. The actor’s usual comic dereliction is brought upmarket and made sad, his outsized mustache slurring and muffling his lines, while his poor, round and lumbering body is pushed hither and thither by circumstance.

The performances all come from such drastically divergent corners that the result often nearly evokes James Sibley Watson’s short Tomato’s Another Day (1930), an early talkie attempt at making fun of talkies, their conventions and fallacies (including the notion that the medium of sound makes the jokes more immediate, and therefore stronger). But in this film the characters coalesce convincingly, in spite of their highly individualized and hermetic madness, so believably befuddled is the world they inhabit. From the killer who imagines he wouldn’t be crazy if he hadn’t read any Chapel novels to the milkman who delivers most of his wares to the house of the woman he’s infatuated with, exaggeration is the norm, and the humor is derived mainly from psychological tics. Lulls in insanity are filled in by the ample bit parts – a zealous Scotland Yard chief, a hysterical aunt of Irwin’s who always calls out to her long-departed dog, a drunken journalist who spends much of the film asleep on Irwin’s couch. As ridiculous as Kramps is, people nonetheless cower before him; Billy, the milkman, remains gratingly one-note, and thus works his charm. When Irwin is compelled to inhabit the role of the pulp novelist (making his creation into a real person) he’s just as bumbling as ever, but manages to go undercover. The leaden aspects of the characters, against the shifting milieus, creates illuminating contrasts.

In the latter half, as the action becomes almost entirely sealed within chez Molyneux, an atmosphere of standard-issue comedy arises, all of the former elasticity seemingly stretched out of the film, and it begins to abandon obstacles such as motivation and consistency for streams of gags. Never does is the film stop at merely satirizing, but gambles all of its credentials, both popular and intellectual, on an impossibly high and completely imaginary tightrope. Mainstream culture demands satirists more than it does detractors, but it also needs those who can safely, from its parapets, bemoan the futility of battling against it. While Carné and Prévert do this almost perfectly in Drôle de Drame, it is their subsequent body of work that proves the fight worthwhile.