Toog's is my new favourite blog. It's charming and rather funny. He has two obsessions: "(1) shepherds, and (2) animals crossing roads".
Today's entry was all about this film from Czechoslovakia (when it was Czechoslovakia). It's made by a guy called Břetislav Pojar.
Toog says "I feel close to the small bear, being naive and candid. And I said to my wife that she's more like the big one; but she doesn't agree". Me and Lil think that she (Lil) is the small one (that falls asleep all the time) and I'm the big one (who wants to play all the time). POST-SCRIPT: There is some debate in our household about whether the little bear is more Lil-like because of the sleeping or the frowning...
I love the colour-palette of this film, all these lovely autumnal blues, browns and reds. It's all so intricately animated but it's not too "busy" either. Lil pointed out how the background is very like a Miro painting:
This is a great ten minutes of cinema, I've been watching it over and over again for the last couple of days. Ever since I read about his idea of ecstatic truth, I've been fascinated by it and by Herzog himself. As far as I understand it, the idea is that truth doesn't rest in facts so much as something beyond them, in something both to do with us and completely separate from us. It has something to do with nature, too, some conception of a primitive human. The "bare life" that Giorgio Agamben talks about.
I was struck when I saw Grizzly Man by the apparent fictionality of the interviews with Timothy Treadwell's friends, the doctor that did the post-mortem and others. I later read that Herzog schooled his interviewers, rehearsing what they were to say and preparing lighting effects and the like, so that when it came to shooting they were effectively acting a part. His point is that the truth would not be served by their "spontaneous" descriptions to the camera, the apparent "reality" depicted given extra technical weight by the lack of carefully planned lighting; the apparent on-the-hoof-ness of it. Truth exists as something far past that.
It's a strange sort of spirituality that I like in his films. Moments of almost-transcendence (I think he'd hate that description) pop up frequently, filmed in slow motion to separate them from the film. It's a fascination with the edges of life - or perhaps the very middle - those moments where life appears close to something beyond its consituent parts, like flying through the air on skis in this film, or living in Antartica, living with bears, dragging a boat over a hill. There's something "other" to his films that's never spelled out or looked at directly, it's always by looking at the effects of whatever this other is that we see it, never it itself.
Looks great, there may well be a blog post about it.
And I finished Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? today, so I will be writing about that at some point in the not to distant future too.
I've been thinking about my faves of the year for a while, and here they are.
Album Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
This is the only album this year that I've listened to over and over again. It's just perfect. "Stillness is the Move" would have got song of the year too, where it not for Al's "Distractions From Studies" compilation with had Noir Desir's gem on it: Song Noir Desir - Le Vent nous Portera (Rubber Room re-rub)
Late in the year, Al made me an excellent compilation. This wasn't necessarily the best song on it, but it's the one I've played again and again and again.
Film The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke)
This, along with his Hidden, could and should easily make any "films of the decade" list someone wanted to write. This film blew me away, it was so, so, so masterful, this is a director at his very peak. It carefully and deliberately builds a case, but so slyly does it achieve this that you don't realise for an hour or two that it's being done, and when finally it hits you what's been happening since the very beginning, all the little hints and clues, it's devastating. Even more so for the fact that nothing comes of it, no resolution, no understanding, it just continues.
Honourable mentions go to: The Class (dir. Laurent Cantet)
- a really vital, alive piece of film-making, I could have watched the kids for hours and hours and hours Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)
- one of the really enjoyable cinema experiences of the year, with the ultimate "if-I-were-going-to-get-married-I-would-have-a-wedding-like-that" wedding In The City of Sylvia (dir. José Luis Guerín)
- a deceptive depiction of voyeurism and obsession, with a subtle critique of objectification and image-making, all done through a beautifully composed scenes, long, langorous takes and slinky, summery light Let The Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson)
- eerie and scary, it grabs you and draws you in to a Swedish netherworld of snow, murder and puberty
Great films on DVD:
The Antoine Doinel series (dir. Francois Truffaut), watched for the first time in their entirety this year, and absolutely wonderful!
In A Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray) - fantastic noir with Humphrey Bogart as good as I've ever seen him. (And I don't really like him that much).
The Best of Youth (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana) - a revelation, an engrossing 6 hour portrait of an Italian family across 50 years of local and international history.
Book In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- clearly the book of my year, it took a quarter of it to read, and deserves all those superlatives given it over the 90 or so years it's been around.
Watched this last night with Graham, Rebecca and Claire. Very, very good. Lots of great faces! The old guys (seen sat at the table, talking about a generation gap) have very similar accents (they both speak Occitan over French) to Honoré, one of the farmers we worked with in the Ardeche. The lives shown in the film were very familiar!
There is a good interview with Lars Von Trier in last Sunday's Observer magazine, but it could have been far better if the interviewer wasn't so intent on explaining Von Trier and his films. It assumes so much of the reader - that they are of the same viewpoint as them, which appeared to be that Von Trier is weird and mad and needs understanding and explaining away into a nice little narrative that makes sense of it all.
Par example, little asides such as this reaction to Von Trier's excitement at a potential idea that try to include us in the author's sneery condescension:
""One of my techniques," he says, "is to defend an idea or a view that is not mine. So, for instance, it could be that I make a film about the human side of Hitler. That would be very interesting to me." I tell him that I can't wait. He nods, either ignoring, or not registering, my sarcasm."
I am fascinated by the same idea that Von Trier is. To argue for, or to defend an idea that you do not agree with is a real intellectual challenge, and one that would be very interesting to to explore with such an interesting film-maker. But no. Instead, the author asks him to define his politics.
What frustrates me in a lot of pieces like this is the desire to simplify and "narrativise" the artist being interviewed. The author of the piece - presumably under a certain amount of editorial pressure to produce something that has some semblance of structure, answers questions set out in advance, and of course, isn't too "highbrow" for a Sunday afternoon supplement - ends up trying to pound the artist into a narrative that they go into the meeting wielding like a baseball bat. Round pegs into square holes. The narrative in this case seems to be that Von Trier is crazy but something's made him crazy and it's possible that that something can be found in his films or in the fact that the person he thought was his dad isn't actually his dad. OK, discovering that would have certain repercussions, but this simple pop-psychology narrative imposed on these stories is so simple it cannot be the answer to all ills.
There is a film that exists - The Five Obstructions, made by Von Trier himself - that gets much, much closer to "understanding" him. This article comes across as tired and out of date. It is essentially a rehash of previous profiles and the giggling fits that the author seems so remarkable are probably Von Trier having some fun with the questions he gets ad infinitum.
Because Von Trier seems to be able to quite successfully separate his self - or parts of it - from his films, interviewers are left in a tiz. I would expect Sean O'Hagan, the interviewer here, to be aware of the possibility of these sorts of issues, especially within art. If we accept that artists are interested in what makes us what we are, and what makes society what it is, it is absurd to expect them to spend their careers broadcasting their personal feelings of the Iraq war, of right and left politics, of feminism, of economics, of whatever. There's nothing quite so boring - and boorish - as someone pontificating on their view of the world, assuming that you care.
(What a sentence to end a blog posting! Ha ha. Irony not lost).
The Believer magazine's March/April Film Issue comes with a DVD of a collection of Jean-Luc Godard's travels in the US. The first film is a 40 minute discussion, called Two American Audiences, with a group of film students at NYU. It's fascinating, especially as the film they're talking about is one of my favourites, La Chinoise.
Towards the end of the film (the fourth video in this post, at about 9 minutes), Godard says that what he liked about Brecht was that he "did philosophy through art". This is, I think, what Godard always tried to do, and Two or Three Things... is a prime example of it. (Weekend would be another, and possibly La Chinoise, although it's more performative).
As such it comes across as a film essay, or a journalistic investigation. It was inspired by a newspaper article on housewife prostitution in Paris, and illustrates Godard's theory that to survive in Paris it was a necessity. (According to the DVD booklet at least).
Compared to some of his other films from the same period that dealt with social and political problems - Vivre Sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat - this is less iconic-looking, less interventionist, but more thoughtful, introspective. A little dull though, too.
The problem, I think, is that it never really gets going. It doesn't build up a head of steam, the cutting is quick but quite unenergetic. There are interesting moments, such as when the whispered narration (by Godard himself) meditates on the relationship between language and image while we see shots of garage signs, street signs, shop titles etc. But generally it has something of the dirge about it. Perhaps it's the tone, which is the same throughout. The film's register never changes, which is uncommon for a 60s Godard film. The viewer is so used to seeing changes in timbre that when they don't happen it feels as if a minute's segment has frozen and extended for ten, twenty minutes.
It's interesting, then, to remind oneself of the highly dynamic, sometimes simple, sometimes complex political films Godard made in the 60s. (Letter to Jane, above, is an extension, or reply, to Tout Va Bien). One can perhaps see in Two or Three Things... the transition between the lighter - yet still socially conscious - films of the early-to-mid 60s and the "political period" films he made for five years or so from 1967's La Chinoise, continuing with Made in USA, Tout Va Bien and many others that are difficult nowadays to get hold of.
I wonder if that is the problem with Two or Three Things... - that it marks a transition, and is therefore neither one thing nor another.
On my film blog, Rushes, I've posted two mini-posts about a couple of films I've seen this week. Not much written, but a couple of good Youtube finds and a WHOLE, ENTIRE FILM! One of the best I've seen this year too!
I bought Koyaanisqatsi as a reward for getting a part-time job in London when I was a student there. The job only lasted one weekend because it was so horrible, but I still have the DVD.
My mind periodically comes back to it, almost without me realising it. I'd never think to name it as a favourite film, but in a way it is. I was astounded by it, it's stuck with me, and I still enjoy it whenever I watch it again.
I don't know what brought it up this morning, but there we go. Thinking about it now, I imagine the film would almost look like a period piece, or, rather, it captures the final days of an extravagant, more-more-more culture; the culture whose acts we are desperately now trying to undo.
The film was released in 1982, and its sequel Powaqqatsi in 1988. Naqoyqatsi, the third part, was released in 2002. Koyaanisqatsi could be seen as marking the transition between the old culture and a new one, one of the "green agenda" and "eco-consciousness". Certainly the director, Godfrey Reggio, has been at the forefront of progressive politics in America for some time.
It's hard to find actual clips from the films on Youtube, but the two here are. They're wonderful.
I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
