Day One of 2007’s version of the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival





McLaren’s Negatives (2006, Canada, Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre)


You know when you’re in for a rough one when the best film of the night is 10 minutes long.

Piggy-backing on the success of the Academy Award winning short Ryan (about one-time award winning Canadian animator and currently homeless artist Ryan Larkin) by animator Chris Landreth, Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre’s McLaren’s Negatives gives a similarly delightful subject-driven treatment of the national treasure that was Norm McLaren. McLaren, himself an Academy Award winner (for his dark evisceration of human nature, Neighbours), narrates the film from a variety of interviews he had given over the years, and both Negatives and Ryan capture the spirit of the artist not merely through snippets of conversation and swaths of dialogue, but through the very format of the work itself. At barely 10 minutes in length, MN’s whets the appetite for more, which is pretty convenient given that a 77m retrospective on McLaren will be screening tomorrow night (Sunday Feb. 4).

Score: 73/100




Puffy Chair (USA, 2006, Jay Duplass)



In many ways just another standard indie rom-com, replete with a soundtrack lifted from The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy, mismatched young lovers, a road trip and an oversized van. That said, the film does get some props for avoiding many of the po-mo pitfalls that often submarine modern films about relationships, namely a ironical stance, often conveyed through self-aware and/or sarcastic dialogue and a visual patina riddled with references to all the movies that the filmmakers have seen. I say MANY of the pitfalls, because the film isn’t completely free of such material—witness the Say Anything boom box moment, with Death Cab for Cutie substituting for Peter Gabriel, and the character’s clever reference to same—but overall, the film seems driven by a purer heart, even if it is fueled by some rather inane dialogue (I could live the rest of my life without hearing Josh [writer/star and director’s brother Mark Duplass, who looks something like a cross between Brendan Fraser and The Office’s John Krasinski] referring to his girlfriend Emily [the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones look-alike Kathryn Aselton] as “dude” or “man.”) Ultimately, the film proves unaffecting because the characters simply don’t have anything particularly interesting to say to each other or do together. As Josh’s brother Rhett (Taliban-loving John alker lookalike Rhett Wilkins, who is the most entertaining thing about this film, playing the space-age hippy. Entertaining does not necessarily equate with original, but you’ve gotta take the laughs where you can find ‘em) exclaims late in the film, “Don’t you guys talk about anything?” The couple in question don’t appear to have meaningful lives outside of the relationship (we never do learn what Emily does for work, or even what she does for fun, for that matter), and as a result, while there are some amusing moments and diverting passages, it’s hard to really feel much of a stake in this couple’s fate.

Score: 53/100


White Planet (2006, Canada, Thierry Piantania, Thierry Ragonbert, Jean Lemire)



Hot on the heels of Al Gore’s Popular Power Point Presentation (AG 4P), we have this Canadian exploration of the vast and forbidding Great White North that is the Canadian Arctic. Phenomenal imagery aside, and the film is beautifully photographed, this is a disappointingly thin documentary that makes little attempt to link the fate of these northern climes to the environmentally destructive activities of the rest of us down below. Other than showing me that the hooded seals are about the ugliest mammals north of the 66th parallel, I can’t say that White Planet gave me much meat to chew on. 28 animals are showcased (if my count during the credits is to be believed), and I cannot say that this survey-like approach yields many interesting results. Comments like “Ice sustains life” are allowed to stand on their own, without explanation, with the facile implication being that the main reason the polar bear is endangered is he cannot find purchase on the ever-thinning ice fields. I watched five minutes of a documentary on The Learning Channel and was given more information about this ecosystem—algae grows on the bottom of the ice, plankton feed on the algae, which attract seals, who just happen to be the main food in the polar bear’s diet. So, no ice, no food for the bear—than in this film’s entire 90 minute running time. Something else I learned, from a little search through the interweb, is that the primary funder for the film was the WWF, who happen to be a shell company for Shell, which doesn’t auger well for the film’s point of view.

Score 48/100

The Mirror (1975, U.S.S.R., Andrei Tarkovsky)

And but so, Ben and I have another go at one of Tarkovsky's most impenetrable films, and come away staggered and awestruck. Same as it ever was.

Ben sed:

This one makes Stalker look like Beverly Hill Cop. The self-referential symbolism, intrasubjective semiotics, neologistic image lexicon - oh sure, I could churn out a bloody paper... but I still wouldn't know what the fuck! And this is my second time round. (The DVD is sooooo much better than the VHS).

Yeah, it would lend itself to some sort of psychoanalytic interpretation - if it was even remotely clear who anybody is. I have some idea some times who somebody is, but not for long, and not confidently, and I don't know why I am learning about them when I am learning about them in relation to the whole thing. Or would that be the job of a psychoanalytic interpretation, to literally identify everyone and bring it all together? Fuggedaboud it.

Unbelievable film. Incredible. Often boring. But you simultaneously feel that the boredom is really just your desire to intellectually master the experience which confounds you, a flight from enigmatic profundity to the comfortable familiarity of being not interested. But then you cannot resist the obvious power and attraction of a scene, a mood, the motion of the camera, the look on her face, a line of dialogue, some Bach, a dog and a bottle rolling off the table and walls with leprosy and fire fire house on fire, through the looking glass, who am I? what is a human being? help me hypnotist, please, some attention here, cure me of my stutter too, I beg of you, just enough to witness such a film, never mind talk about it, because, like the doctor said with words, words are useless, "flaccid," yet we are condemned to them and don't think I didn't notice the passage when the boy reads Rousseau out loud.

I suppose I picked this one subconsciously or, what the hell Ben, reach out, intuitively. Coming off that encounter with Fabbri I have sought out a film that achieves what he attributes to Kieslowski's TDLOV. You want vagueness as the pathway to the transcendental non-meaning of meaning? Call on line one for Mr. Tarkovsky. Mr. Tarkovsky please pick up line one. And, having done my best to pull out a comfortable chair for Fabbri, I believe I deserve to hammer a couple of comparative points now.

Call me a bummer, an emo goth downer, but without suffering and strife, I just don't get transcendentalism. There's got to be negativity to transcend. I know I already said this in my review of TDLOV but here it comes again from what must be the double life of Ben Livant. There isn't even any tension between Ver and Wer, never mind a fullblown contradiction, which there must be in order to achieve interconnected, non-dualistic, synthetic wholeness, blah blah blah.

Directly related to this, the other thing that presents itself to me so strongly is how Tarkovsky always injects his mysticism into the natural, material world; into animals and leaves on trees and right into the very dirt. Of course, his cultural world of houses and books and coatracks is just as positivley charged. Where this resides between energetics and animism is beyond me, the point is EVERYTHING throbs in Tarkovsky. Not so in TDLOV. There, all of the magic is at best intersubjective, a vibe connecting not all being but people exclusively, and even the potential for this is squandered for the most part, rendering the film more of an intrasubjective journey than anything else, a vibe connecting the self with itself, (although how is anybody's guess). In Tarkovsky, everything is alive, organic, of the whole living universe; connected and separated at the same dialectical time, and yes, in not a trivial degree of pain. It seems to me that Kieslowski seeks to overcome lonliness, isolation, alienation whereas Tarkovsky accepts this as existentially necessary somehow and can do so because he has faith - faith goddamn it - that everything really is one. Kieslowski does not have this faith. TDLOV is at least a few steps removed from this so it - can you excuse me yet again Fabbri? - substitues beauty for truth. Tarkovsky will accept no substitue for truth. That is what makes The Mirror, indeed all his films, so beautiful.

And Dan Stumbles in for a Moment:

You'll get no argument from me (I know, how disappointing) when (I infer that) you assert that, between Kieslowski and Tark, Andrei-san is the greater artist. Not to take anything away from Kieslowski, who really is one of the great filmmakers of the same period, hell, one of the great filmmaker's PERIOD, but Tark's films get under your skin, burrowing their way into your subconscious, with an insistency that would have been Kieslowski's envy.

Like you, I recently re-watched The Mirror, and unlike my first viewing, which perplexed and confounded me, fell into the groove of the thing. Unperturbed by questions of who was whom and what was what (mostly it was clear when and where we were, even if it wasn't so sure what the hell was going on), I relaxed and enjoyed the show. The film has a palpable throb about it; in Tarkvosky, as in Macbeth, walls have been known to move and stones to prate. There is a profoundly Freudian analysis waiting to happen here, as Tarkovsky had deeply ambivalent feelings about his mother and first wife, who by all accounts was a dead ringer for his dear old mama (I believe that that is his mother in those closing shots with the young child--meant to be Tarkovsky?-- walking through the field) but I'm not scholarly enough, particularly in the Freudian aspect of the analysis, to attempt it (actually, it sounds like the sorta thing that would be right up Robin Wood's alley.) Regardless of my shortcomings and Tarkovsky's oblique symbolism and codified imagery, I know art when I see it. And it doesn't take a helluva lot of reflection (heh) to see that The Mirror is all that.

Then Ben:

He's so great I simply have to jam my politics up my ass because let's face it, from what I can muster, he figures Western civilization peaked somewhere in the 14th Century. How many times have we talked about this? And when it comes to The Mirror, his take on women is especially suspect. How many times have we talked about that? Everything about him is so backward-looking and dark and depressing. So why do I find him so vital and inspirational and contributory to the future of us all. Like I said, I feel he has faith, of some kind. Maybe his art is as close to that as I can get. I don't have faith, (yeah yeah, I do in atoms and in my fellow man every other Wednesday), but I am convinced awe is essential to humanity and Tarkovsky definitely ministers to my need for awe.

And Dan:

Yeah, Tark's movies sing like angels. He almost has me believing in 'em, too.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959, France, Alain Resnais)


Wherein Ben and I warm up to the cool stylings of Alain Resnais.


Ben:


This is a very, very good film. Almost excellent but for its problems with pacing and didacticism. I will not elaborate on these weaknesses, however, because I have recently had it brought to my attention that it's OK to catch other people doing things right.

First and foremost, the opening scene was, for me, like the Taj Mahal. In short, it rises above the hype and delivers. I've visited the Taj and it blew me away, transcending all the journalism about it I had encountered over the years. I reckon every time I mentioned that I was meaning to check out HMA, you told me about the opening scene. It simply devastated me. Devastated me.

As did the subsequent segues from the lovers to the depictions of the city, the museum, the horror footage; all of this cut and blended brilliantly, with very effective musical ques and great respect for images, all the while the voice over laying the ground for the love story to come and already investigating the central theme of the picture - the duty of memory. After this quasi-documentary had been going on for a while, I mistakenly thought that the entire film would be conducted along these lines - visual impressionism accompanied by equally impressionistic language markers - and I was sold on the power of this, ready to take in an entire film of it. So I had to adjust when the film adopted a more conventional construction, (although I am aware that the use of the flashback device was still relatively unusual when the film was made). I settled in, however, and attached myself to the lovers and their relationship.

The romance of it all does not conform to cliches about the French, that's for sure. Certainly there is passion but ultimately it is not erotic. It is rather fuel for ethical feeling. This is due to the function of the love story as a vehicle for the thematic concerns of the film, overall a cerebral presentation. I think it would be incorrect to say that the love story is intended to be nothing more than a metaphor, the film is not that abstract, we are supposed to care about these two concrete characters. Yet, I think it is also valid to hold that the particular biographical substance of these individuals is offered as a means of entering intellectually into the world history the film demands that its audience never forget. In short, the personal is political.

This means that remembering is not simply a private matter on behalf of my own self-consciousness. It is a social responsibility. Historical consciousness is a fundamental precondition for praxis, for political engagement. What direction the latter should take is not specified by HMA, which restricts itself to a moral urge for pacifism. No doubt, this is what allowed the film to reach a wide international audience and considerable acclaim upon its release. For what it is worth, it seems to me reasonable to locate HMA's take on the duty of memory somewhere inbetween Marker's radical dystopian critique in Le Jette and Resnais' own later Marienbad, which is a po-mo harbinger to the extent that The Self, and therefore consciousness, disappears from the picture and we are left to grope around in serial time without history and reified space without geography.(Sidebar: I referred to Marienbad when discussing Kieslowski's Veronique and pointed out that it can not tolerate reactionary nostalgia. This is to acknowledge here that it annihilates any ground for conservative thinking just as much as it does progressive thinking). Alternatively, it might be better to compare HMA to Resnais'I own previous Night And Fog, which really does let the fucking facts speak for themselves. In any case, however it is ideologically grapsed, HMA is ultimately a feel-bad movie, if I may invert a tag. There is no refuge in psychological repression.

From a cultural perspectice, the meeting of a reconstructed Japanese urban environment with a post-war French humanist sensibility gives HMA a unique aesthetic and historical quality. Like, it would have been fascinating if Kurosawa had made a film in Paris after it had a few years to begin recovering from Hitler. At the end of the day though, HMA stands as a negative shrine to the bomb. I would be interested to know how it went over - the film, the film, Jesus please - in Japan at the time and how Japanese critics regard it today.



Dan Responds in Kind:


I'm glad you found the stardust in this one as well. It's interesting that you mention the memorability of not only that opening sequence, but the entire opening montage of nightmare images. It is one of my very favourite pieces of filmmaking; whenever I get the urge to reacquaint myself with Resnais, those of the fifteen minutes I go for. Startiling stuff. And like you, I remain kinda intrigued about what kinda film this would have been had Resnais stuck with this for the length of the feature. The film becomes a little less interesting when the film returns to an identifiable format and narrative, perhaps because it seems rather mundane after this exotic and unconventional opening. For all I know, 90 minutes more of this trippiness would have (eventually) bored me silly. I wouldn't have minded the challenge, though. This was the period of great experimentation in European cinema, with the French New Wave, Fellini getting weirder and weirder, Antonioni and his head trips, so Resnais must have fit right in.

And yet, I can also see why the new wavers in France were interested in this guy, but never really embraced him as one of their own. Resnais was certainly bracing, challenging the status quo (Monica's right, at least based on what I've read about Hiroshima's reception--the film's interracial romance was what really got chins wagging) not only with his subject matter (Holocaust, nuclear war, our ontological identity, or whatever the hell he's up to in Marienbad), but also with his cool (as in chilly, not hip) style. And it is the emotional distance that struck me about Hiroshima; for a film about a doomed romance, it doesn't have much heat (could help explain the qualifier "doomed" I guess). I know that there's blood here and their's passion between them (those opening shots leave little doubt) but as soon as they start talking, the temperature cools considerably. The fire and spit of early Truffault and Godard are not for Resnais. He's almost clinical in his approach. I believe I called the film fascinating but stilted [just checked. Yup] in my original review back in the day. I suppose that this is how he believes that we will help to ensure that our memories are more reliable, by divorcing them from emotion. I dunno. I still adore the film, particularly that opening salvo, which continues to knock my socks off.

Not so parenthetically, I went back and hauled up my review off of Apollo Guide. Here it is:

I'm glad you found the stardust in this one as well. It's interesting that you mention the memorability of not only that opening sequence, but the entire opening montage of nightmare images. It is one of my very favourite pieces of filmmaking; whenever I get the urge to reacquaint myself with Resnais, those of the fifteen minutes I go for. Startiling stuff. And like you, I remain kinda intrigued about what kinda film this would have been had Resnais stuck with this for the length of the feature. The film becomes a little less interesting when the film returns to an identifiable format and narrative, perhaps because it seems rather mundane after this exotic and unconventional opening. For all I know, 90 minutes more of this trippiness would have (eventually) bored me silly. I wouldn't have minded the challenge, though. This was the period of great experimentation in European cinema, with the French New Wave, Fellini getting weirder and weirder, Antonioni and his head trips, so Resnais must have fit right in.

And yet, I can also see why the new wavers in France were interested in this guy, but never really embraced him as one of their own. Resnais was certainly bracing, challenging the status quo (Monica's right, at least based on what I've read about Hiroshima's reception--the film's interracial romance was what really got chins wagging) not only with his subject matter (Holocaust, nuclear war, our ontological identity, or whatever the hell he's up to in Marienbad), but also with his cool (as in chilly, not hip) style. And it is the emotional distance that struck me about Hiroshima; for a film about a doomed romance, it doesn't have much heat (could help explain the qualifier "doomed" I guess). I know that there's blood here and their's passion between them (those opening shots leave little doubt) but as soon as they start talking, the temperature cools considerably. The fire and spit of early Truffault and Godard are not for Resnais. He's almost clinical in his approach. I believe I called the film fascinating but stilted [just checked. Yup] in my original review back in the day. I suppose that this is how he believes that we will help to ensure that our memories are more reliable, by divorcing them from emotion. I dunno. I still adore the film, particularly that opening salvo, which continues to knock my socks off.

Not so parenthetically, I went back and hauled up my review off of Apollo Guide. Here it is:

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour operates under the weight of its reputation as the "the most important film made since the war," a title accorded it by filmmaker and ex-Cahiers du Cinema cohort Eric Rohmer. Director Alain Resnais' at-the-time radical treatment of the fluidity of time, shifting from past to present without any warning, thereby "fracturing" time, has since become accepted filmmaking practice, making some of the critical accolades heaped on this film appear hyperbolic, but if we view the film sans the burden of expectation, and place it in the appropriate cinematic and historical context, Hiroshima, Mon Amour emerges from the hype as a somewhat stilted but still intellectually engaging glimpse at profound and challenging questions of the role of memory in our sense of identity. Hiroshima, Mon Amour 's famous magical opening sequence – a pair of naked torsos of two lovers (Emmaneulle Riva, Eiji Okada) embracing while a glittering sand (or is it radioactive ash?) coats their bodies – is a gorgeous and haunting image that quickly, beautifully and succinctly establishes the film's complex themes and difficult central relationship. Over a 24-hour period, the entire course of this lovers' relationship will be played out. As they move around contemporary Hiroshima, they begin to drift quietly apart, as the past begins to seep into their experiences until past and present merge, and to some extent at least, time loses meaning.

Can you live (or relive) a lifetime in one day? Hiroshima, Mon Amour posits that time as we conventionally understand it doesn't exist, but rather we live in our perceptions and memories, which layer atop each other to produce an experience of life that constantly shifts in time. Okada's character is at once sceptical, as he denies that Riva has seen the real Hiroshima throughout the film's opening documentary-like montage that carries us through Hiroshima past and present. He begs Riva to stay with him in Japan, despite the fact that both are married and from very different worlds. The strikingly handsome Okada ( Woman in the Dunes) is generally believable and affecting in this important role. An architect, Okada tries to build a bridge between them by wrenching her out of the past, but while she may wish to be through with the past, it isn't through with her.

In the film's most wrenching sequences, over a glass of beer, Riva revisits her youthful war experiences in Never, France, confronting the ghosts of her doomed forbidden and hidden relationship with a German soldier during the Nazi occupation. When Riva, an actress who is in Hiroshima to make a film protesting nuclear war, wrenchingly reveals her wartime journey from bliss to madness, the effect is more draining than cathartic, leaving us, if not pessimistic, at the very least sceptical about the power of love to transcend the boundaries that separate us. The relationship of both pairs of lovers in the two different contexts of past and present confronts questions of personal and political existence, as Riva innocently and perhaps naively believes that love can erase personal borders (mirror images of Riva atop the two men in her past and present abound) and political or racial boundaries. Riva is sexy and beautiful, completely inhabiting this role in a manner that is both riveting and extremely affecting. The movie is based on a screenplay by acclaimed French novelist Margeurite Duras that Resnais claims to have shot virtually word for word. While some of the dialogue seems stilted and overly-literary, this is not a Masterpiece Theatre knock off, as Resnais is certainly very capable in his use of the camera to illuminate the film's themes.