by
J. Hoberman
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Let’s call her the spirit of the place. Paris apartments are cluttered, Parisian lives are messy, the city is shown so congested you can smell the exhaust fumes. To cope, Hou himself has adapted a looser, more lyrical style—using window reflections, some of which seem digitally sweetened, and shallow focus to layer and otherwise complicate the image. A movie that encourages the spectator to rummage, Flight of the Red Balloon is contemplative but never static, and punctuated by passages of pure cinema. A medley of racing shadows turns out to be cast by a merry-go-round. A long consideration of the setting sun as reflected on a train window that frames the onrushing landscape yields a sudden flood of light. There’s a relaxed interest in backstage technique—the yet-to-be-erased techie visible in Song’s film, a puppeteer’s hidden “dance” in Suzanne’s performance, the use of the end credits as a coda to the movie.
[...] The Strange Case has its documentary aspects as well. In one apparent non sequitur, Oliveira frames the house cat intently watching the landlady’s canary. The shot is held until, somewhere in the vastness beyond the frame, a dog barks, humorously underscoring the cat’s presumably unscripted concentration.
Playing out its dialectic between the infinite and the ephemeral, the movie ends with the song of the workers in the vineyard. The landlady draws the shutters on Isaac’s window. The camera that is Isaac’s room vanishes, along with Oliveira’s, leaving only darkness and the sound of fading footsteps. The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case—pictures move and time stands still.
Everyone on this journey is a student of life. The futile quest and fruitless interrogation are paralleled by inane small talk among the various investigators as well as a series of fraught private conversations between the party’s two professionals—the glib prosecuting attorney and a self-effacing young doctor riding along as a witness to pronounce the corpse dead if found. Headlights illuminate the landscape and transform it into a near-empty stage. (As much as Once Upon a Time concerns the problems of deductive logic, it’s also a movie about the quality of the light.) Midway through, in a scene of uncanny loveliness and material visions, the group pulls into a remote village for a late-night meal at the headman’s house. The night has given birth to a dream. Later, with the sky beginning to lighten over a hill as bleak as Calvary, the searchers find that for which they have been searching (perhaps) and go about creating an official report complete with detailed descriptions and photographs of … what?
“There’s a reason for everything,” someone says unconvincingly, once back in the car. With the mission accomplished, in a somewhat farcical fashion, the film might have ended here. There is, however, a morning after. The corpse is brought back to town so that the doctor may perform an autopsy. The night of mystery is over. The evidence can now be pondered by the dawn’s dreary light. Procedure is followed. Still, however banal the daytime images, a metaphysical darkness remains—and even grows. Will the presumed widow identify the body? Can she? The autopsy begins, presenting more puzzling facts. Why is there dirt in the corpse’s lungs? What is dug up must again be buried.
'Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle!'
David Lynch
B: 1946 / N: American
To source ideas and images for his films, David Lynch plunges into the pool of his subconscious via transcendental meditation. What makes his work so exceptional - and idiosyncratic - is a willingness to share the fruits of these interior deep dives and make sure they are largely unadorned and uncensored. It is the life of the mind writ large, and it has meant that, as a modern behemoth of cinematic creativity, Lynch has been able to perch in that liminal space between traditional romantic genre cinema and full-bore experimentation that sometimes borders on the abstract. One moment that remains emblematic of his project is the breathtaking opening sequence to 1986's Blue Velvet, in which a hauntingly manicured vision of provincial America is punctured with scenes of a man suffering a stroke while spraying his lawn, followed by a delve into the grass, where we experience the sub-aural thrum of an ants' nest. We run the gamut between ethereal beauty and nauseating dread in record time. In the mellow pageant of American life, Lynch sees beauty and horror not so much as opposite sides of the same coin, but as a singular entity that can permeate everyone and everything simultaneously. His formidable 1977 debut Eraserhead looked at birthing and parenthood through a surreally baroque lens, while later works, such as Wild at Heart (1990) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), danced on the precipice where raging, intense love tips over into splenetic violence.
What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time.
Andrei Tarkovsky
B: 1932 / N: Russian
Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky made films about why life is worth living and why death is worth dying. He took up the mantle of locating meaning in the evanescence of existence, whether through confirming the presence of an obscure, spiritual higher power (1966's Andrei Rublev), speculating on our complex relationship with the untapped cosmos (1972's Solaris), or merely reflecting (as in 1979's Stalker) our collective desire to find a secret place of infinite knowledge and understanding that will allow us to answer the one true question: why? In his later films, he shifted away from contemplating matters metaphysical to focus on stories that emulate human memory and our perception of time (1975's Mirror and 1983's Nostalgia). In his 1985 book Sculpting in Time, he drilled down into his creative impulses and waxed philosophical about the power of the camera as a piece of heavy machinery that can be used to make art through minutely calibrated (and intellectually invested) montage and framing. All his later inspirational and aesthetically dazzling achievements were foreshadowed in his 1962 debut proper, Ivan's Childhood, a deceptively conventional drama about a 12-year-old boy acting as a messenger on the Russian front during World War II. From its opening dream sequence onwards, Tarkovsky daintily chips away at time with his trusty arsenal of tools, obsessed by the fragility of human consciousness in a world rife with torments and reasons to lose faith in it all.
AN INTERVIEW WITH ISABEL SANDOVAL
'I feel like the best films are essentially a Rorschach test!
You're interested in something you refer to as 'sensual cinema' - could you define what that is?
For me, sensual cinema is really about desire. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we go and watch films, or experience art. We are drawn to something that elicits that feeling of desire within us. The making of films is essentially a way for the creators or artist to project or translate the desire that they feel into something visible that can be experienced by spectators. I think it's also part of my personal evolution as both a person and an artist - especially after my transition. After my transition I've become more comfortable and more open about sensuousness and sensuality in my work, in that it's now no longer shrouded in a feeling of shame or guilt. I was born and raised a Catholic in the Philippines, and I think my transition and the psychological and emotional process that I went through helped me to overcome that. With desire, and tackling desire in art and on film, our experience with the art transcends rationality because desire is rooted in something more primordial, even biological. I would consider a film that I make to be successful if it allows viewers to experience desire beyond rationality. Where someone realizes they like or love a film, but can't pinpoint the reason why.
[...]
For me, the most sensual films are actually about desire being repressed rather than being satisfied or consummated. I think that repression and actively yearning is a more realistic human experience than physical gratification. The films that give you the ending that you want and that sense of closure are energy expended. You can go back to your life and routines and everything is fine. But it's the ones that got away that linger within us. If Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love [2000] ended happily, then no one would still be talking about it.
As a filmmaker, you have to believe in the people - in their power - because if you do not believe in the people, then why do you make film... for what? Béla Tarr B: 1955 / N: Hungarian
Hungarian writer-director Béla Tarr plays 45pm genre film records at 33rpm speed. He uses cuts very sparingly, instead opting for sinuous sequence shots where his somnambulic camera slow-waltzes across, around and through a given space. Although Tarr's work may appear antithetical to the snappy 'genre' entertainments produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, he does co-opt the iconography and story structures of musicals, westerns and noirs, and then drags them into his own dismal microcosm of dive bars, boggy fields and desolate townships. Damnation (1987) is a classic film noir, but displaced to a run-down burg where the only true pleasure to be had is watching a torch singer at the local pub. It has the femme fatale, the tragic patsy, the scheme that goes wrong and the downer ending, but these elements are presented to emphasize the crushing duration of dead-end boredom. The artful expression of torpor, done in a way that is utterly compelling despite its testing duration, is Tarr's stock in trade, and the ne plus ultra of his project is 1994's seven-hour magnum opus Sátántangó (Satan's Tango). This includes a famous scene in which a young girl plays with a cat and becomes ever more aggressive with it. Tarr will not allow you to look away while the scene runs on and on. He pushes the idea that cinema has the ability to imprison you in a moment, and the director gets to decide the length of your sentence.
The cinema was an explosion of my love for reality.
Pier Paolo Pasolini B: 1922 / N: Italian
The films of Italian polymath Pier Paolo Pasolini demonstrate that the term 'reality' can be subject to multiple definitions. The concept of his 1964 film The Gospel According to St Matthew was to present the life of Christ as terse realism rather than romantic fantasy. What if Jesus were a real person, and his miracles mere humdrum acts administered at random? Pasolini started out working in the neorealist vein popular in postwar Italy, and his 1961 debut feature, Accattone, remains one of the finest examples of this influential movement interested primarily in the life of the common man. His casting of non-professional actors and his fulsome embrace of life's squalid underbelly would remain with him until the last. All of his films, whether set in the past or adaptations of bawdy medieval stories Bocaccio's The Decameron, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), speak to contemporary mores. He is a filmmaker with a thrilling sense of purpose and urgency. Prior to his brutal, unsolved murder in 1975, Pasolini directed Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a loose adaptation of the eighteenth-century novel by the Marquis de Sade. It is one of the most punishing and difficult films ever made, detailing a procession of violent acts and sexual humiliation inflicted on a group of teenagers by four wealthy middle-aged men. Salò deals in the reality of degradation, as Pasolini remains unflinching in his belief that witnessing these horrors is the only way to truly comprehend the reality of fascism.
[...] Lorne went searching for pigeons' eggs and found two. I cut the top off one and sucked out the contents, but perhaps it was a bit too late in the nesting season because there was a bony sort of consistency about it, and although it was nearly dark Lorne must have seen my face, because he refused to eat his.
This would have been the moment to run for it, except that we could think of no satisfactory answer to the question, 'What do you do when you find yourself in the middle of Leipzig, in RAF uniform, on a summer afternoon, with no money, no papers and no food?'