Observations: Audience as "Outsider" in Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep

Criticism: Drive(2011)

 Christopher Sharrett talks about the negotiating space that the masculine identity pre-occupies in the acclaimed 2011 film Drive, which has been largely misunderstood as a simple genre film inspite of the complex postmodern aesthetic that it actually employs.Although partly disagreeable due to his own pre-occupations and discrimination of mainstream films ,this piece by Sharrett illuminates indispensable aspects of the film that have been somewhat marginalized due to the films highly stylized generic nod. An excerpt:

"Refn expands on notions about the collapse of masculinity central to Hollywood narrative, making this investigation not simply derivative of Mann but central to his ongoing project of uncovering the dangers inherent in traditional masculine images that are disintegrating into an especially dangerous formation, along with the patriarchal capitalist society it represents. "

The complete article can be found here

Observations: Christian Marclay's The Clock

For the uninitiated, The Clock is a video installation by Christian Marclay, a 24-hour montage of scenes involving clocks, timepieces or any cinematic allusion to clocks, selected from film and television footage from all over the world. In that it exudes with immense possibilities to resonate across cultures, spaces and "times", it becomes an instant masterpiece.  Rather than being a mere video installation, the film becomes a pure cinematic organism, a clock that goes on without having to be wound up; a feature that has been used at various art galleries where the film was exhibited, where it plays in sync with the local time. It reflects upon the possibility of a hyper real collective imagination where time exists completely free from spatial intervention and connected only by the inevitable changes in time itself. It also allows the audience to exert/assert her own identity onto the film, in that one can anticipate familiar incidents from one's film viewing career which involved any allusion to time: be it about the Hitchcockian "time-bomb" or the famous shot of Buster Keaton hanging from the clock... 

Peter Bradshaw in his article for the Guardian points out how

The Czech writer Petr Král, in the essay entitled "Time Flies" (collected in Gilbert Adair's excellent 1999 anthology Movies) describes watching with a companion the 1916 silent movie serial Judex by Louis Feuillade. He recalls: "Suddenly on the screen there appears a clock set in the centre of the kind of sumptuous salon that epoch, and Feuillade, alone had a taste for; it shows 4:40pm. One of us automatically consults his watch: 4:40 to the second. For an instant our present, across the ruins of several decades, has rejoined that of an afternoon in the 1910s." The pleasure of making this connection, infinitely repeated, is at first a conscious, then a subconscious or unconscious pleasure in The Clock. 

One wonders whether Marclay uses that segment from Judex for his 4:40 segment.

Watching the 24-hour film in its complete running time seems a daunting task and while I completely agree with the critics who have said that one has to seep into the immense temporality of the film in order to experience it's true power, the few minutes that I was able to see had a profound impact on me; and an extrapolation of this very impact exerts the film to be a masterpiece. I saw 4 minutes of the film, from 12:04 PM to 12:08 Pm. We see, in these four minutes, various known and unknown clips from across the world, which include a corporate meeting, Colin Firth talking, Richard Gere getting up at noon in a reflection of the erratic lives some of us may have,a royal family resting in the English countryside, a scene from what seemed like Darkness in Tallinn, and Gary Cooper in High Noon.
The staggering variety of spaces that we travel across in these few minutes, along with the fact that the on-screen time matches with the real time in which we see the film(the clip that i saw can be found here; it comes with a welcome note to watch the film in sync with the screen time) transcends the viewer-image relation and asserts the possibility of a postmodern identity bound only by cinematic time; an assertion that feels wonderful in its own terms.

The only thing that was a little unnerving for me was that most of the clips were taken from English films or television show and this irked my post-colonial identity. This might very well not be the case with the rest of the film,which could be giving an equal weightage to scenes from various countries, but  I wouldn't know about that.Even if that is true, the postmodern aesthetic of the film welcomes multiplicity of opinions and this is something that I felt. I was reminded of the wonderful dialogue from Wenders' Kings of the Road, "the yanks have colonized our sub-conscious"; could it be that the English-nations, with their elaborate representation of time, have colonized our assertive screen identities? Such unsettling stuff, masterpieces are made of...

Review:Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In 2010 I made a not-so-serious oath in front of my friends to kill a couple of filmmakers the first chance I get. They were Silvio Soldini and Tomas Alfredson. ( Soldini is a separate issue which I will talk about some other day, if I bother to that is.unlikely.) The reason I wished the death of Mr. Alfredson was not very well formulated; it was just that the extent of thematic, ideological and aesthetic messiness that his last film Let the Right One in was, and the possibilities that the film seemed to hint at yet never quite well utilised (I had recently watched Werckmeister Harmonies back then, if anyone wants a hint as to how good Alfredson’s film could have been) made me feel a certain contempt towards the presumably well established life of Mr. Alfredson.  He returns with the restrained espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, adapted from John le Carre’s novel of the same name. On a very basic level, the film functions well with its restrained atmosphere complementing the equally temperate series of interrogations. The fact that the novel redefined the way spy novels functioned certainly comes across in this seemingly faithful adaptation of the novel, especially in its tone and pace. But then the film gets over-ridden with the Alfredson bug. The oddball mix of absurd, seemingly Lynchian shots combine with some flaccid aesthetic choices to make a seemingly powerful film into one giant mess. Notable however, are also a few moments of brilliance within the film, which I attribute to the screenplay and/or pure chance after seeing how lame Alfredson can get. For my own ease, I have divided this review into two parts concerned with what is RIGHT and what is WRONG in the film in order to see in depth into the messiness and mixed reactions that the film otherwise generates.Oh, and there will be spoilers. If that matters.

WHAT THE FILM GETS RIGHT

In its attempt to reconstruct the tone and restrained configuration of the novel, the film sure gives us a "realist" spy film; devoid of physicality and predominantly psychological. The ill-focused, non-participating backgrounds sure induce a restrained sense of paranoia which does well to entice one into the atmosphere.

(Un)luckily for the film, my viewing of it was followed by a viewing of Rivette's masterful Out 1: Noli me tangere which is perhaps the paragon of implicit cinematic paranoia and in comparison, the mood of Tinker Tailor faded into a concealed sense of empathetic gesture from me. "Yeah, well. You tried your best. I get it and respect you for that."Equally plausible would be the converse; that the mood of this film is actually frizzled out and doesn't hold out very well in comparison to other genuinely powerful films. But then I am talking about the pros of the film, so yeah. Get my drift.

The film also succeeds in doing what its primary obsession is; to deconstruct the myth of England as one of the major world forces past its World War glory. What we see instead, is its most competent men, who handle its intelligence in this Cold War paranoia, veering towards a dreary non existence, often suspecting and blaming each other on the way. The whole east-west dichotomy gets absolved in the process and what is left is not an idealized nation but a muddled utopian projection that can only be chuckled at. "And the west has become so very ugly" expresses a character. We have no option but to agree. There is a shot where the usually inert background comes to life with the quote 'Woman is the Future'. A perverse dig at the aging old men who try to come to terms with their nation's inadequacy and a bitter prophecy about the sweeping politics of Thatcherism that will invade England in a few years, this statement rounds up the contrast between the idealized project that these men had aspired their nation to be and what it has actually become; it is clearly not the best of places, nor the best of times.

There's also how the film employs sweeping camera movements and powerful zoom-outs to reconstruct a puzzle out of different people's memories. And since a major motif of the film is to look at the past to identify a hidden element therein, this technique works well, seemingly glorious at times. Like this opening zoom-out of the Hungarian landscape-

 Some stuff about this aspect and some other not-so-agreeable points regarding the film by the brilliant Ignatiy Vishnevetsky can be found here.

As I said earlier, the film's concern is predominantly psychological and nothing illustrates this better than the showpiece monologue of the film where Smiley talks about his meeting with Karla and how that one meeting has scarred him since then and how his wish to undo that meeting is what truly drives him now. As Satish Naidu points out, 

as is the case with many monologues I wonder if the audience is the speaker himself. It is the elaborate expressionistic centerpiece of the film’s motivations and Smiley loses himself in it, miming the past, which is strange (against the pattern) in a film that is essentially drawn towards it. In front of him is a chair, with empty space over it, and Smiley fills it with himself... and here’s Smiley talking in a vacuum about a shadow who was to meet certain death and yet seems to have the power now all to himself. It is one incredible choice from Mr. Alfredson, to cut to an intense close-up of Smiley as he stares into the frame, which quite unmistakably becomes a mirror of sorts. More than anybody in The Circus, it is Smiley who is haunted by Karla, by his seemingly endless almost fictional potency.

This brilliantly realized close-up of Smiley in which the camera irrevocably achieves the status of a mirror effectively reflects the emotions of Smiley, savoring each emotion off his face and layers about his psyche with it. This shot also establishes why Gary Oldman is one of the best actors working today. Bar none.

This mirror shot is complemented in the ending where the slight smirk on Smiley's face as he leans forward indicates that he is now ready to undo that incident he had been hiding from for so long. It's a face-to-face with Karla now, and nothing can stop him.

 WHERE THE FILM GOES WRONG

Now that the obligatory good stuff has been discussed, I would start off with my real issues with the film. A major problem I have with the film might as well hark back to the ideological core of the novel itself; with a possibility that this problem got pacified within the over 400 paged novel but becomes really apparent within the duration of the film-as a text concerned primarily with the psychological apparatus of the characters and revolving around their morally ambiguous choices, it seems strangely black and white. There are constantly formed polarities, dichotomies which are quickly and effectively resolved, never letting a gray zone to exist. Characters' motives and actions are firmly guided by the central alignment of the narrative: nothing goes askew. To put it in a Marxist idiom, the base seems to be predominated within the textual framework by the superstructure, which seems out of place. Smiley loves his wife unconditionally and that is all that drives him: her gift, the lighter now in possession of Karla and therefore Karla himself is his prescient link with her gesture of love towards him and everything he does is an attempt to recover that material token of love. Seems legit, but for the implicit cold war paranoia and desperate post WW2 glorification that the national intelligence seems to  be clouded with, and which very much becomes apparent within the film in a sub-textual manner but its seeming affect is close to zero on Smiley. Or on any other character for that matter. Consider how morally polarized the characters whose narration advances the plot are when Smiley interrogates them. Tarr has no one else to go to. So he would reveal everything to Smiley without holding anything back. Haydon or Prideaux have nothing to lose, so they would speak their hearts out to Smiley in order to make it convenient for the reader/audience. In a state that is seeping with paranoia and everyone suspects everyone else, human relations strive on mis-communications as much as they do on communicability. That just does not happen here. What we have instead are characters, who, once their moral ambiguity has hit the fan, become as uni-dimensional as they can be.

The same is true as far as the characters' sacrifices go: all are based on human relations. Except for, of course Esterhase, who is reduced to a dummy and the mole, who gives his own set of reasons for the betrayal. Everyone has to sacrifice their lovers or as is the case with Smiley, come to terms with the sacrifice. And the bland homo-eroticism that developed between the student "Bill" and Prideaux in order to draw parallels with the relation Prideaux' previously had with the other Bill was simply pathetic. 

Moving on to the aesthetic choices. In the beginning we have Lacon giving the responsibility of finding the mole to Smiley. We have a close-up of Smiley's face followed by a sequence showing all the four suspects i.e. Smiley imagining one of the four to be the mole. In this one aesthetic move, Smiley is established as the innocent man who will from now on, genuinely attempt to flush out the mole. Which would've been fine in case there was no reveal later as to how Control suspected Smiley as well, to be a prospective mole. The statement that this aesthetic choice makes is clearly a disregard for the intelligence of Control which is re-affirmed in the end as proper and not merely some senility-infested paranoia.

There is a clear disregard for the audience's intelligence in the film and the shots are placed simply to give them a narrative arc. Consider this example:-

 Around the 35-minute mark, we are shown in a series of semi-Bressonian shots, a man supplying the secret files to Polyakov.
Before this sequence, we have the central Christmas party segment and after it, we see a medium long shot of Smiley sitting. Now as to why we had this sequence here, there is no clear aesthetic explanation. We could have argued that this was all Smiley imagining about a prospective mole but then these sequences also involve a woman and a dog about whom Smiley is not aware of until later on in the film. Therefore an otherwise beautiful possibility of this actually being Smiley's imagination can be ruled out. Therefore, the narrative is not a meta-extension of Smiley's or anyone else's psychology but the narrative instead comprises of fragments from a collective consciousness a la the Christmas party(and much other random stuff). In simpler words, narrative is the dominant motif here and all the sequences are there just to simplistically narrate the story to the audience. Why then do we have many critics and viewers alike, complaining about their inability to properly follow the plot? Why indeed?

You know, I can go on and on about the poor aesthetic choices but I frankly don't have the patience anymore. I have a feeling that this write-up is developing into a weird droll anyway. Honestly, in the obligatory second viewing that I undertook, the film degraded into a giant aesthetic mess and I didn't watch past the first hour in order to preserve some of the dignity that the film had accrued in my first viewing

Rating:2.5/5

Top Ten Films of 2011

I promised a review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but I digress to present this best of 2011 list instead. Now, given that we are almost two and a half months into the New Year and most other best of 2011 lists have been since long done away with, it is rather odd to post this list now. But the thing about living in a place devoid of any major film festivals and/ or screening clubs etc. means one has to wait for the various bootleg editions of the films to be available. And although it has taken me few months to catch up with most of 2011(I started out genuinely looking for 2011 releases from mid-November last year), I can confidently say that I have seen a fair amount of important works from the year to make a safe top 10 list. And since most of the important releases become available towards this time each year, my best of the year lists would also probably come out around this time; as I don’t believe in jumping into making obligatory top 10 lists at the end of the year without having watched the real good stuff(I had only seen 3 films from my top 10 list in 2011!)

Now, regarding the films- it has been a glorious year for cinema. In all its ability to amaze, enthral, elegize and eulogize, cinema this year has achieved its true meaning. We have seen the birth of the universe and the end of the world and everything in between. What truly characterized cinema in 2011 was a constant attempt to reconnect with one’s history, one’s ontology and a knack to self-reflexively reconstruct one’s identity cinematically; attempts which would have made cinema’s true theorists and masters proud. 

I can confidently call this year as one of the best years for cinema right since that train arrived in La Ciotat in 1895. Despite having seen many masterful works from the year, I still haven’t watched many more important works which could have a very good chance of altering my current top 10. Some of them are: my man Wim Wenders’ Pina, Sokurov’s Faust, Shame by Steve McQueen, The Loneliest Planet by Julia Loktev, Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon, Mildred Pierce by Todd Haynes, Dominik Moll’s La Moine,Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, Life in a Day, Kaurismaki’s Le Havre. A lot more happened last year which is slipping off my mind. But the sheer density of misses and hits(I had roughly 30 contenders for my top 10 list) testifies to the fact that it was simply a magnificent year for cinema. Now on to the countdown:

10.The Kid With a Bike(Dardenne Brothers): The simplicity of their craft, as always, is amazing. The narrative unfolds gradually revealing within itself layers of meaning about the characters of Cyril and Samantha until both of them, laid-bare, are reconciled. A poignant retelling of a classic fairy-tale, this one is arguably the most accessible Dardenne bros. film and was rightly awarded the Grand Prix in Cannes. And the acting of Thomas Doret as Cyril is impossibly amazing.

 

9.Once Upon a time in Anatolia(Nuri Bilge Ceylan): One of the weaker works of our modern expressionistic master, but that is strictly to express the immense power and spirituality the films of Ceylan withhold;  here is a Chekovian crime investigation piece that delves into the very heart and mind of Turkey, both rural and urban, both the old and the new worldview. And then of course, there are the beautiful steppes of Anatolia; where the stone faces from the past haunt you, the unkempt water fountains flow for some rare tourist to wash his face in, and where the most gruesome of human crimes is pacified by the sheer elegance of journey. There is also Cemile, the divine daughter of Anatolia, who very much embodies the spirit of the valleys, who will, if luck favors, have to be given out in a negotiated marriage. Ironic, no?

8. Elena(Andrej Zvyagintsev): This intensely subtle piece that at once examines and deconstructs the notions of morality, family values and criminality in contemporary Russia is a powerful socio-political satire. One of Zvyagintsev's and Russia's finest films in recent times, this film is an effective counter-point for Ilya Khrjanovsky's devastating Chetyre(2005). Also indispensable to the film is this fine fine deconstruction of the film by Satish Naidu here

7. The Artist(Michel Hazanivicius): Fiercely misunderstood both by its supporters and its repellents, The Artist is neither a "charming little silent film" nor a hollow recreation of the 1920s; it is a postmodern cry, an outrage, an invocation for the better world of cinema that existed back in the good old days.(additional thoughts soon) 

6.Un été brûlant(Philippe Garrel): It's the refined, inescapable romantic longings that get you right at the outset of the film that characterise Garrel's films. That's the thing about Garrel; his ability to capture humans, often lovers, at their most base, most immobile and make them look glorious with his special look, his framing, his lighting or whatever the hell he does. It's just...pure emotions

5. Sleeping Beauty(Julia Leigh): A counterpart of sorts to Garrel's film, in that it oozes with the impossibility of romantic moments to happen in our gloriously materialized lives, while Garrel's was all about the romantic feelings' existence; this glorious expose about how delineated our seemingly perfect lives really are, stuns one with its markedly assured approach to its aesthetic choices. Julia Leigh is THE director to watch out for.

4.The Strange Case of Angelica(Manoel de Oliviera): Mastery. Pure cinematic mastery. Not that one can expect any less from the oldest master-director working(103 and going strong!!). This oh-so-subtly crafted film about the cinema's ability to reconnect with the past and transcend reality is intense cinematic catharsis.

3.Nostalgia for the Light(Patricio Guzman): Inevitable comparisons to Tree of Life aside, this is a film whose sensual style and honest examinations immerse the viewer into the director's quest for the "meaning of it all". Deeply poetic and profoundly moving, this attempt at examining one's ontological history becomes an ontological register of unlimited possibilities itself. We wonder about the possible reciprocity of the Chilean sky, those squalid prison houses and the miles of sand defining who we are, sitting in a very different nation. The immense universality that this film hints at, is the true power of cinema.

2. The Turin Horse(Bela Tarr): The last film of a true master of aesthetic, modernist cinema cannot be expected to be less majestic.This fantastic in depth review by Srikanth Srinivasan sums up everything I have to say about the film.  In it's sparse, minimalistic design, the film celebrates the end of the world; the unique cinematic world of Bela Tarr is no more, there will only be mad men rambling about the death of a god...

1.L'Apollonide (Souvenirs de la maison close)(Bertrand Bonello): The original french title reveals most about the film's intentions. It gives to us "souvenirs" from a Parisian bordello at the turn of the 20th century, without conforming to presenting any back story of the characters or making a psychological reading of the women. In that sense, it is the closest that a film comes in recent times to exhibit the Balazsian philosophy of cinema rescuing the existence of things; in this case, the "thing" happens to be a bordello set right at the beginning of cinema itself. In it's regard for the time and space(right outside these walls the Lumeire brothers would have possibly recorded their historic films, and their negation of the existence of such a brothel can be concluded to be the first traces of cinematic censure.) this film achieves infinite importance. These are the women that cinematic history had denied a place to, and Bonello very much negates this denial by presenting to us a document of historical value above anything else. With their dreams, lives, death eulogized within the frames of cinema, the film exhibits another amazing feat of self-reflexivity in the end that exonerates all meaning and achieves a catharsis beyond anything ever before. Cinema had saved these women. Or had it?

 

Introductions...

Erm...hi all.! So I am a hardcore cinephile and despite my frequent urges to view my opinions regarding a film or so and having made this blog many months ago, with that very purpose, I usually kept bailing out because a) I find myself as technically dumb as one cane be and that makes me feel inferior whenever i visit a blog with fancy hyperlinks and everything(Now that I look around the blog writing space it actually seems easy. Still this blog would generally consist of dull, overtly-simplistic write-ups so please bear with me there) and b) I am lazy as hell, so I always think that I would not be able to maintain this thing, so one may not expect regular updates here. With that out I'd give out a brief intro about myself

Cinema to me is all about aesthetics. If a film doesn't get its aesthetic choices right, it is poison to me. Apart from that I am a fairly easy to please critic, even though I can boast of being as hardened as they can be, partially because of having seen pretty much everything that there is in the world of cinema. My weaknesses include a relative non-knowledge regarding The Czech New Wave(barely seen the essentials), Philippine cinema(I need to explore the films of Lino Brocka, Raya Martin et al) and my arch-nemesis; the mainstream cinema of anywhere and everywhere, of which I always seem to be watching less and less. My favourite filmmakers include Wim Wenders, Bela Tarr, Aleksandr Sokurov. Antonioni, Philippe Garrel, Claire Denis among many others since they strive to use the cinematic medium not merely as a storytelling premise but also as an effective aesthetic tool to represent various aspects of the human life. My cinematic philosophies incline towards Bazin and Bela Balazs

With that out, I'll begin with the blog. First up will be a review of the hit 2011 espionage drama Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I hope you enjoy visiting this blog. :)

PS.- I am opening this blog to engage in intelligent conversations regarding cinema as that does not happen enough in my real life. So if you have any comments or thoughts, please comment. Thank You..