Wasp (2005, UK, Andrea Arnold)

Ben Livant:

OK. So I'm trying to catch up on all the things you've sent me. So I click on this link. And the minute the thing starts playing, I know I've made a mistake. Because it's a beautiful sunny day. And I don't want to watch a movie right now, not even a short one. I want to finish my email, shut off my machine and get out in the sunshine. But the thing is still playing. And the energy coming off of it is immediately powerful. A disturbing, menacing energy that makes me even more want to shut the thing off and go outside. But it's just too powerful. And now here I am, having watched the whole film.

Excellent. Just excellent. Made me cry when, after exploding in understandable but still unjust rage at the oldest daughter, she manages to bring the devastated girl into the group hug. And then the relief I felt, verily, the gratitude to the film-maker, for the denouement; the family finally getting supper, that must have been paid for by the man, and he saying that she should let him step into her place so they can talk.

All of this emotion that came out of me at the end of the film is a testament to the tremendous tension the director was able to build up beforehand. It's an outstandingly excellent piece of short-story telling, benefitting from the compression effect that can only be achieved by a shorter rather than a longer narrative.

The impact of this compressed form is very well crafted cinematically, most especially in the tight story-boarding and lean editing, but also by certain cinematography choices; especially close-ups and jittery camera fixtures which make everything feel trapped and unstable at the same time. You just know something is going to go horribly wrong. But when it happens, it is credible, unsensational, and all the more serious and terrible for it.

The characters are not complex as such but their situation is, very fucking complex, and this situation conditioning the characters makes them complex by association. In short, all of the psychological depth comes from the sociological context. In other words - realism! The class consciousness informing the whole story is front and centre and beside this, the hardball feminism has only one toe not as much in the spotlight.

Excellent, just excellent. Andrea Arnold. I'll have to remember that name.

Dan Jardine:

I concur on all fronts, and so have little to add. The film had me from the get-go, and held me by the throat throughout. Thank God for that restorative ending though, because if any of those kids had been harmed, I would have had to do something unspeakable to the mother. Turns out that her redemption was mine as well.

Wasp won the Academy Award for best short film in 2005. Every once in awhile, the Academy gets one right.

And you'd better remember that name all right, as she is the director of Red Road, Arnold's bloody good feature film debut. I lent this to you on Wednesday night, and look forward to our opportunity to discuss it soon.

Wasp is available on Youtube, but to make life a little easier for one and all, I've embed both parts below:






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It Might Get Loud (USA, 2008, David Guggenheim)

And then Ben said:

It might've gotten louder as far as I'm concerned. I enjoyed It Might Get Loud but the film doesn't really deliver the goods. Ostensibly a document of a summit meeting of three well respected and highly influential guitar players from three different generations, the meeting happens but the three hardly reach the summit together. There is actually very little footage of the three of them in the same room and even less of them making music together in it. What little music they do make together is fine enough but it's not an especially inspired session.

Had they been given a chance to hang out together for a while without the cameras focused on them, jam a bit, rehearse this and that, get to know each other as people a little too, have a beer away from the bright lights and the film crew... But it is all too obvious that none of this took place. It's not that they appear tense as individuals or out of sorts as musicians. It's that they simply have not had any time to work up to the point of hitting the massive groove.

Why there is so little footage of the three of them together is a mystery, but the rest of the film tracks them as independent artists, providing impressionistic snapshots of their respective biographies and aesthetic principles. All of this is loosly organized around an even more vague Platonic idea of what it means to be a guitar player. I suppose this is supposed to become evident by way of synergistic connections, themselves achieved by the editing. I can't say this big picture ever came into view for me.

Still, there are some lovely moments in the film simply due to the high profile reputations of the three musicians. Watching The Edge and Jack White both grin from ear to ear as Jimmy Page stands four feet in front of them and starts cranking out Whole Lotta Love for their personal edification, you have to grin from ear to ear yourself. Plus there is some very cool archival footage, heartfelt introspection and some wistful nostalgia that seems deserved. The film definitely has a heart. What it's lacking is real guts, that place deep down where the music comes from.

The trailer:




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Invictus (USA, 2009, Clint Eastwood

And so Ben sez:

I'm not into sports in a big way and I'm generally wary of patriotism. The supposedly sublimated violence of the former often fuels the organized xenophobia of the latter. Militant supporters on the sidelines are in a recreational dress rehersal for war. On the other hand, sometimes the aggression inherent in athletic confrontation is indeed sublimated into healthy competition and mutual respect. Assessed politically, it becomes a question of whether sports and patriotism can affirm domestic unity and international solidarity at the same time. It's not impossible but it's so rare, one could be forgiven for reckoning the challenge was to square the circle.

Such a miracle of geomtery was the 1995 Rugby World Cup hosted and won by South Africa. Invictus tells the tale in the standard Hollywood way. A bit too much sappy music. All the rough edges sanded off the characters. All the realistic complexity of the situation erased in order to present a super-simplified, feel-good story about the triumph of the underdog team and by association their fans. The significance of this is not trivial in this particular super-simplified, feel-good story because it happens to be true. All of the drama in the film rests on the post-Aparthied reconcilliation potential of the event. Invictus - based on the book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation - well, the book title says it all.

Unfortunately, all of the drama of the film resting on what is all said by that book title is not enough drama. The rough edges are so sanded off of Mandela, the film amounts to hagiography. Personally, I'm so desperate for honorable political leadership, genuine statesmanship, I'm prepared to let this go. Name even one other person alive today with the ethical gravitas of Nelson Mandela. Fine then. Morgan Freeman strides through the film as Moses in a business suit and I can dig it. It's the two-dimensionality of the rest of the characters that drags Invictus down dramatically. In erasing all the realistic complexity, the film gives nobody anything interesting to say or do. There are no interpersonal conflicts, there's no dramatic tension. Especially lacking is tension among the members of the team. There's a bit of superficial grumbling but nothing that enters substantively into the historical context. A bit more is explored by way of the security staff on detail to protect the president, but not enough to really raise the dramatic stakes. Alas, not unlike a Disney picture for kids, all that is left is the drama of the sports competition itself.

But here's where the nonfiction of the story turns inward on the film in a terribly disappointing way. The outcome of the historical rugby match is known in advance. Where's the drama in that? I suppose the sheer physicality of the game, the action down on the ground, might have been enough to generate some theatrics. But this doesn't come off in Invictus. I don't know if the problem has to do with the cinematography or the choreography of the play or something intrinsic to rugby that makes it less dramatically photogenic than other sports. I don't know. But whatever the source of the failure, the failure is palpable. Watching the victory game is just not the viseral thrill it absolutely must be, what with everything riding on it.

Of course, in reality, there was much less riding on winning the cup in the end and much more riding on the mere fact of hosting the competition in the first place, as Wikipedia explains:

The 1995 Rugby World Cup was the third Rugby World Cup. It was hosted and won by South Africa, and had the distinction of being the first Rugby World Cup in which every match was held in one country.The World Cup was the first major sporting event to take place in South Africa following the end of apartheid. It was also the first in which the South African national team was allowed to compete; the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB, now the International Rugby Board) had only allowed the readmittance of South Africa to international rugby in 1992, following negotiations to end apartheid.

Meanwhile, 15 years later, it remains all too easy to shoot the shanty town scenes on location. In observing this, I must also take note of the best line of dialogue in the film. It is spoken by the black maid of the parents of the captain of the rugby team. He has just informed his family that he has been instructed to meet with the president. The maid speaks up. Tells him to tell "Madiba" that the buses are too expensive.

The trailer:




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Between the Folds (USA, 2008, Vanessa Gould)

Ben:

The brevity and modesty of this film are essential to it's efficacy as both an entertaining and educational documentary. For the reputation of it's subject matter is also that of something small and unprepossessing. That origami is actually something massive and marvelous is made evident by the soft-spoken and less-is-more power of this film. And just as the film makes the viewer reconsider any prejudices that might be held about origami, reflecting on the film itself, the viewer realizes that it too turned out to be something more than expected.

This is a lot of fancy talk to say that Between The Folds handed my ignorant ass back to me on a plate. I popped the disc into the machine with a patronizing attitude; you know, origami is a quaint craft for kids. The film immediately gripped my attention with it's philosophic sensitivity, held my attention with it's aesthetic sophistication and ultimately made me pay proper attention to the nearly miraculous creations these people make from a single sheet of paper.

And as if it isn't enough to produce from a two-dimensional medium a three-dimensional form with exacting detail, one of the origami practitioners (origamist?) achieves motion conducive structures that actually lend themselves to dynamic reconfigurations. Yet the fragility of the structure only allows a limited window for this. I predict the emergence of origami performance art that by material necessity is as singular as the wiping away of a sand mandala by a Tibetian monk.

Conceptually what I found most profound was the nondichotomization of art and science. The most passionate origami artist must enter into mathematized technique and the most logical origami scientist must enter into the emotional core of creativity. And on a very personal note, it breaks my heart that I cannot share this film with my dead dad. One of his favorite metaphors for the dialectical interpenetration of opposites within a whole was what he called "the pizza fold;" i.e., moving dough folding over on itself.

If nothing else, I have been humbled by this film. The advanced origami displayed requires folds hundreds and hundreds of times over, in some cases, reaching into the thousands. The most I can manage every now and then is to play the one record I own by the Ben Folds Five.

And Dan:


Because Bevin had previously sent me some links to the work of some of the artists featured in this documentary, I was not surprised by the quality of the artistry involved in the origami. That said, I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work of the documentarian, Vanessa Gould (her first film, as far as I can tell), who does a terrific job of conveying the mathematics and aesthetics of origami, while also digging into the philosophical issues presented by the (sometimes faux) dichotomy of the two.

I fully expected the film to be a straight forward fawning over the increasingly intricate and technically sophisticated work being done on the field of origami, and the film fulfills expectations in the opening scenes. However, it quickly moves past such pedestrial considerations--I mean, how excited can you get over the devotion to increasing the fold count? It's no different than getting a hard on over Cameron's advancement in the field of 3-D CGI--and onto the more engaging questions, such as what is the relationship between technique and artistry? And is more necessarily better, or is there a point where the mathematics takes over and the aesthetic consideration are swamped by a quest for complexity?

Here is where the film really took off for me, particularly when the artists in the field examine the need to move into more philosophical directions, such as studying the evolution of the two dimensional material into a three dimensional artistic statement, or the development of an artistry of motion out of the static. Gould's film is evocative and intelligent, just like her subject matter, and she is smart enough to let the artists do the heavy philosophical lifting, turning her abstract inquery into concrete reality before our eyes.

Then Ben:

And some of the stuff they make is incredible man!

And Dan:

It most certainly is. That said, after being dazzled by the increasing sophistication of the designs, I was completely knocked out by the guy who showed us the many beautiful things that could come out of a single fold. It was like reading William Carlos Williams after perusing some T.S. Eliot.; the film got me thinking about bigger aesthetic questions without being pedantic.


The trailer:

The Raven/Le Corbeau (France, 1943, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Ben Livant:

Just this week I watched and reviewed Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009) and in my review I referred to Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery (1948). Now I am commenting on Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, Le Corbeau (1943) - which another reviewer has called a "distant cousin" to The White Ribbon [see: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-white-ribbon/4460] - and which makes me think of Shirley Jackson yet again; this time, her short story, The Possibility of Evil (1965). I categorized The White Ribbon as a "poison-in-the-well" piece [see: http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/02/poisoned-well-of-truth-the-white-ribbon/]. Others may or may not find this categorization convincing, but there can be no debate that Le Corbeau is a poison-in-the-pen piece.

As with Jackson's story, the plot has to do with an individual anonymously sending hateful gossip to all and sundry in town in order to satisfy what can only be a nefarious purpose. The crucial difference between the story and the film, however, is that the audience knows from the outset who the culprit is in the former but only finds out at the very end of the film.
Jackson's is a critical character study the lays bare a sociopath who perversely sees herself as a righteous pillar of the community. Clouzot's is a whodunit mystery that would be trite if not for it's penetrating investigation of parochial hypocrisy and the dark underbelly of those next door neighbors we thought were nice... but little did we know.

Hence, in Jackson's story, the expose necessarily ends with the corrupter getting hers in the end. This happens in Clouzot's film too but only instrumentally for the narrative. Thematically it's all about how all of us have dirty little secrets. And the best exchange of dialogue in the film reveals that our dirtiest secret isn't so little. You know that line we draw between good and evil so we can claim to walk straight on the side of good? Uh-huh. Total bullshit.
Not to take this too seriously though. Le Corbeau may be far from trite but it is just as far from profound. The cynicism coming off of the thing is mostly for show. It's an exercise in style that draws heavily on American noir. There are some wonderful passages of cinematography that achieve this feeling within a provincial French town, which is cool in it's own right. One that especially stood out for me is the nurse/nun wearing a flowing black habit and veil, running away from vigilantes in broad daylight against white-washed walls of old stone. The Raven indeed.

Meanwhile, the film satisfies another noir requirement, a dark sense of humor delivered by way of hard-boiled dialogue. For all the suspense and unwholesome interactions, I found myself laughing along the way and I do believe Le Corbeau should be appreciated as a form of satire. To call it a "distant cousin" to Haneke's The White Ribbon, well, the distance is very, very great; my own middle-man references to Shirley Jackson notwithstanding. I'll not pursue this further except to say that Haneke appears to have adopted Kubrick's title as the intellectual Ice Man of cinema... minus the sense of humor.

And Dan Jardine:

Context is key to fully appreciate the greatness of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau. Shot in the first year of the Nazi occupation of France under the watchful eye of German-controlled Vichy France, and by logical extension, the film industry, through Continental-Films (who understood the value of movies as propaganda better than they?), Clouzot’s film had to walk quite a tightrope in order to escape the censor’s scissors. Not only that, it had to withstand the attacks of French patriots who viewed Clouzot’s willingness to work with the German controlled film institute as proof that he was in the first rank of collaborators: A man who had sold his soul to the Devil just so he could continue to make movies.

But Le Corbeau ain’t just any old film. This taut, tightly wound 91m film is a despairing and morally complex look at the things that damaged people living in a dangerous time will do. That it is a thinly-veiled examination of the many difficulties of living in Vichy France is the common wisdom today, though that allegorical aspect of the film seems to have initially slipped past the folks at Continental-Film who okayed the film and the censors who allowed its release. So there’s some interesting meta-criticism going on w/r/t the film, in that folks wonder about the morality of taking money from the Nazis, while making a final product that is essentially anti-Nazi. ‘Tis a real head scratcher, that one. But, in the end, for any film of this sort to succeed, it must work at both literal AND allegorical level, and Le Corbeau most certainly does that.

Our attention throughout the film is focused on Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Freznay), a secretive, curt and stolid man who claims that all he seeks from this life is peace, though we’re not initially sure what torments him, or from what he is trying to escape. He is first seen washing blood from his hands (is he Pilate? Macbeth? Why all this guilt?) after performing an apparently shady operation where the mother is saved, while the unborn child is not. That we don’t know him, yet are quick to pass judgment is one of the many preconceptions that will be used against us later.

Published over two decades years after the release of Le Corbeau, Shirley Jackon’s terrific short story The Possibility of Evil appears to have been inspired by Clouzot’s film. Both are built around the same premise, an anonymous citizen is writing poisonous letters attacking the townspeople’s misdeeds, in the hope that it will lead them to correct the error of the ways. Instead, in both story and film it creates a climate of paranoia and dis-ease that spreads like a virus, infecting everyone in it path. At first, the townspeople try to ferret out the epistle-writer, but soon grow frustrated with that, and instead turn their paranoid concerns to the most prominent victim of these insidious attacks, Dr. Germain. Complicating our reaction to these events, as the persistent victim of many of these smears, Germain is not a particularly appealing hero. He is cool and aloof, detached and even a little arrogant. And the charges made against him may have merit: Germain just might be guilty. And we just might cheer his fall.

When cracks begin to appear in Germain’s veneer, he turns to his landlord’s sister, the promiscuous Denise (Ginette Leclerc), for comfort. While she cannot promise eternal rest for all that troubles him, a few hours of oblivion is better than nothing. As is almost always the case with Clouzot, the film seethes with sexual tension. Germain is attracted to both Denise and Laura, a nurse’s sister who helps out in the hospital. The young and lovely Laura happens to be married to an elderly Dr. Vorzot, (Piere Larquey) is playing a cat-like role in the film, toying with the minds of the citizenry, though most fascinated by the mysterious Germain. while watching in the wings is Denise’s Lolita-like 14 ½ year old niece Rolande (Liliane Maigne), who is clearly smitten w/ the good doctor herself.

Clouzot fills the frame with moody imagery. There is the titular raven, of course, but the film also has a predominance of darkness in the lengthening shadows and the many characters who wear black dress. The contrast between light and dark/good and evil typically reflecting this post-Expressionist pre-film noir symbolism is best exemplified by the verbal face off between the sarcastic and seemingly omnipresent psychiatrist Vorzet and the frustrated and angry Germain while a lamp swings on a pendulum between ‘em. Clouzot’s influence in moments like this was obviously great. Not only did Hitchcock admire him, but the great Orson Welles used similar tactics in Touch of Evil, a full 15 years later.

The moral complexity of this film’s approach is thoroughly modern. Some of Le Corbeau’s wicked comic undertones are quietly slipped into the film, particularly in the scenes involving psychiatrist Vorzot. He is a clever and insightful cynic whose running commentary on the story is always good for a chuckle. While some of Clouzot’s targets are more subtlely attacked, such as the petit-bourgeois values of the townspeople (Denise dismisses Germain as pathetic because he’ll never rise above his narrow bourgeois mentality) much of Le Corbeau is about taking on much larger targets. Clouzot is obviously concerned about the effects on a society of living in a culture of informants and collaborators, and he is not afraid of also incriminating the audience as well as his film's characters. This is a town full of tiny monsters, each willing to betray his neighbour if it’ll bring him a little peace and quiet, a little refuge from life’s storm. Only in a Clouzot film would the sole figures of empathy and hope be such terribly damaged females; the limping Denise and the distraught but vengeful mother of an apparent suicide. But neither is heroic in any conventional sense, as both suffer from physical and emotional wounds that cause them terrible grief and leave them virtual pariahs in their community. This may be a restorative ending, but it is not without its victims and its open wounds.

Using secret informants to rule by fear was clearly a tactic the Germans found useful in Vichy France, so it isn't too surprising that once it was released, Clouzot’s film was deemed too dangerous, and soon shelved by the Nazis. Ironically, it wasn’t just the right wing who attacked it, but the communists as well. They viewed the film’s portrayal of the townspeople as too cynical, and lacking the appropriate sort of heroic values they wanted associated with the average Joe and Josephine fighting the good fight in wartime France. Equally disturbing to many on the left was the notion that Clouzot took money and resources from the Germans in order to produce films while the Nazi’s were simultaneously slaughtering thousands of innocent people all over Europe. In the end, while Clouzot was attacked as a collaborator for choosing to work with the Nazi-controlled Continental-Films, that didn’t stop him from making a film that the Nazis would soon realize was subversive, and which now stands tall above and beyond the criticisms of the day, as a biting comment on the degenerative effects of using vicious and paranoid practices to bind together in fear any society of people.

Then Ben:

I think that my review proves yours. The conditions under which it was made and the circumstance in which it was originally screened - this is indeed the key to fully appreciating Le Corbeau. While I continue to feel that the film is not endogenously profound, the exogenous factors you observe have taken my sorry ass to school with respect to the clandestine communications it portrays. I absorbed from the film a general philosophic - and therefore, not especially deep - investigation about people in general passing information and disinformation. But of course, it makes all the difference in the world who is saying what to whom behind what cloak in occupied France. Are you an informant or working for the resistance? More than just sinister gossip, the poison coming from the pen in Le Corbeau is thematically intended for some and not others operating underground. In short, it's political. Clearly, I was unaware. And I have to think now that the reviewer who called The White Ribbon a "distant cousin" to Le Corbeau was not so unaware, although I still maintain that these cousins are too distant to kiss.

Meanwhile, is it necessary to know that On The Waterfront is Kazan's rationalization for personally cooperating with HUAC in order to fully appreciate that film? I am sincerely asking this question. I suppose any answer would ultimately boil down to a definition of "appreciate" in this context.

And Dan:

I don't think it is essential in the case of On the Waterfront, because there is so much greatness in the rest of the film (casting, cinematography, set designs, editing and so on) that it can stand on its own two feet. First time I saw the film as a teenager I had only the very vaguest appreciation of the film's political context, and I was knocked out by it. Knowing now what I didn't know then, I am naturally less impressed by the film.


The Trailer for Le Corbeau:

The Pawnbroker (USA, 1964, Sidney Lumet)

Ben Livant:

Somewhere between the Taxi Driver New York of Martin Scorsese, the Annie Hall New York of Woody Allen and the Do The Right Thing New York of Spike Lee is a good beginning suggestion of the New York that came into my mind as an adolescent visiting relatives there and eventually living there for a year. In short, the mid 70s to early 80s. Although I have been to New York many times since then, that time continues to constitute my frame of reference. It is relative to this that Sidney Lumet's work from the 60s is so fascinating for me. I am engaged by that-New-York-then for what about it was and what about it was not to become the New York of my frame of reference.

I have caught near-the-end bits of The Pawnbroker on the TV twice over the years, but I of these I remembered only the authentically New York setting when I put the disc in the machine last week. The atmosphere of the film is indeed genuine. Lumet is nothing if not a socially conscious realist. But I was also impressed by how much cinemantic style is present. The performances are ultra-naturalistic. Stieger turns in a characterization that rightfully established him as one of the leading method players on the scene, and the rest are solid too. Yet, there is no shortage of obvious blocking and tracking to achieve clearly pre-conceived mis en scene results. Throw in the tight cutting to indicate instantaneous flashbacks and the sometimes too-effective soundtrack by Quincy Jones and the whole thing really knocked me out for it's artistry as much as for it's on-location grit.

Thematically, as cautious as I am in 2011 about any Holocaust facts becoming the ideological property of Zionist ideology in general and Israeli policy legitimations in particular, the dramatic power of the story of a camp survivor who is psychologically damanged past any kind of humanistic repair is beyond reproach. This is especially the case considering that The Pawnbroker was made in 1965, two decades after the end of WWII when the topic of Holocaust survival was only just beginning to be addressed in the mainstream. Perhaps this explains why the film enters into its topic with a pretty high degree moralistic restraint. It makes its point with narrative economy and emotional sophistication in a socially complex contemporary context. Not just the acting, the screenplay is damn good.

Looking at it from a post Spike-Lee perspective, The Pawnbroker displays a white, liberal fear of portraying blacks specifically in any sort of negative light. So there are certain multi-cultural social groupings in the film that are a little bit bogus. On the other hand, there are individual depictions across all the races that are remarkably progressive for their diverse inclusion and veracity. Over all, The Pawnbroker stands today as one of the great pieces of New York neo-realism, and I use the latter category precisely to suggest that the American development in the 60s probably best represented by Lumet is coming out of certain fundamentals of the Italian development in the 40s.

Dan Jardine:

Saw this one as a kid on TV. Impressed and terrified the hell outta me.

A famous clip from the Pawnbroker:



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